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GM offered workers a signing bonus of $8,000 per member if they ratify the deal, plus wage gains or lump-sum payments in all four years of the contract. The carmaker says it’s offering to keep members’ health-care contributions the same as in the current contract.

“What GM is doing is highly unusual,” said Harley Shaiken, labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “It’s going over the head of the UAW leadership and seeking to address the members and the public more generally. That is a highly risky strategy. It tends to galvanize the membership in support of the leadership and complicates an already tough situation.”

Implicated President

Before the two sides held talks over the weekend, the UAW was distracted by federal corruption charges against leaders in a scandal implicating the union’s president, Gary Jones. While the UAW’s executive board met on Friday and discussed whether to remove him from the role, he has kept his job, a union spokesman said.

Jones didn’t attend the press conference but was quoted in the union’s statement that called the strike.

“We told UAW GM members that we would stand up for them and their future,” Jones said in the statement.

The walkout will be just the second national work stoppage at GM since a 67-day strike in 1970. GM did have a 54-day strike at a key plant in Flint, Michigan, in 1998 that effectively shut down most of its assembly plants.

The impact of the latest strike on the U.S. economy will be negligible compared with 49 years ago, when the 400,000 workers GM employed at the time represented about 1.2 per cent of the national payroll. The automaker now has about one-tenth the number of union-represented U.S. employees.

Any deal the UAW reaches with GM would set a precedent for the jobs, wages, benefits that the union demands from Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. The union hasn’t said which carmaker it will target next for bargaining over a new contract.

GM has been under attack by President Donald Trump for shrinking its U.S. workforce and idling plants in the key electoral battleground states of Michigan and Ohio. On Sunday, he sent a tweet calling for the carmaker and union to “make a deal.”