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A last-minute proposal from Stellantis on Friday morning offered enough progress for the union to hold off on widening its work stoppage against the Jeep maker for now, Fain said.
An expanded work stoppage among the Big Three automakers would exacerbate disruptions to an industry that makes up about 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Much depends on how long the strike lasts, Austan Goolsbee, president of The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said Thursday during a talk at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. The Chicago Fed serves a seven-state Midwestern region that is home to many of the Big Three auto factories.
Past strikes show that if the work stoppage is short, say a month or less, it has little effect on GDP, Goolsbee said. “The longer it goes and the more spread across multiple companies, the more the short-run impact,” he said.
Historically, strikes haven’t had much effect on inflation, he said. But he said that his staff is keeping a close eye on the inventory of vehicles in the marketplace. “We saw during covid times that when there’s extremely low inventory, that can do wild short-run swings in prices of cars, both used and new,” Goolsbee said. “And we’re trying to get a handle on, if this thing were extended, would we have a dynamic that is different than in previous strikes.”
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