While United Auto Workers and General Motors Corp. continue to search for an agreement to end the strike, Jelissa Hardy will be staying within the safe confines of her East Shaw dorm room.
Until the strike ends and her father, a GM employee, gets back to work, Hardy won’t have any health insurance.
“My health insurance is under his job,” said Hardy, a broadcast journalism sophomore at MSU. “So basically, when they’re on strike, they have no jobs, so my health insurance is cut until they get their jobs back.
“I just want my health insurance — until I get my health insurance back, I have to be safe.”
Hardy is one of several MSU students who have been temporarily stripped of their benefits because they have UAW parents on strike.
John Beck, associate director of MSU’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations, said thousands of students at MSU have parents who work for GM plants across the state.
The UAW represents about 73,000 GM workers nationwide who went on strike Monday because the parties couldn’t reach an agreement regarding several issues, including job security and health care. About 6,600 of those employees work in assembly plants in Lansing and Delta Township.
Despite the problems that could materialize for UAW workers during the strike, it’s important for the UAW to continue fighting for what they believe in, said Renee Rademacher, daughter of UAW Local 602 President Douglas Rademacher and an advertising senior.
“The reason they’re doing this is for job security and for their futures,” Renee Rademacher said. “They’ve worked hard their whole lives, this is what they were promised, and they deserve it, and I think their fighting is legit. They’ve worked very hard their entire lives doing intensive manual labor and they deserve to be secure in their old age and in their retirement.”
It’s unclear how long the strike will last, but it could definitely pose problems for students who have UAW parents, Beck said.
“They’re already going back to the bargaining table, so it could be over in no time,” Beck said. “On the other side, both the parties have economic decisions to make about striking. In the case of companies, they have to decide how long they can weather a strike before it begins to cut into their ability to meet the needs of consumers.
“On the UAW side, how long are people going to be willing to stay out when they have to worry about where the house payments are coming from and other things like that?”
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