![master of orion on strike master of orion on strike](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gundam/images/1/19/Strike_Rouge_Phoenix.png)
from bankruptcy with a fifty-billion-dollar bailout. eliminated pensions for new employees and introduced “Tier 2” workers, whose wages started at half those of traditional workers. on September 14th, when the workers’ current contract expired, but its origins are in the concessions that the union has made over the past several decades, and especially since the last financial crisis. The strike officially began at 11:59 P.M. Organized like the factory’s work schedule, the picketing lists divide the workers into three eight-hour shifts, with each worker required to picket for one shift every six days. On one wall hung six large sign-up sheets, filled with an alphabetical list of the plant’s workers, each of whom were assigned to picket a particular gate or entrance at the plant. When I visited last Friday, the hall was bustling with people passing out picket signs or grabbing a quick lunch of hot dogs and chips. G.M.’s heavy-handed tactics appeared to have galvanized the other members of Harper’s local as well. “They’re hoping to cripple us and break the union.” (On Thursday, the company abruptly shifted course, and promised to keep all health-care benefits “fully in place” for striking employees.) “They just did it out of spite,” she said. (The union also pays strikers two hundred and fifty dollars a week out of its strike fund.) Harper said that G.M.’s decision to cut off coverage had only strengthened her resolve to keep striking. of targeting the workers’ insurance to “leverage unfair concessions,” and promised to pay for COBRA health-care benefits, which it says will be retroactive, for every G.M. Harper now fears that Matthew’s health could deteriorate further if he does not receive his biannual intravenous treatment, which costs roughly forty-five thousand dollars and was scheduled for two days after he lost his insurance. “He still walks with a little bit of a limp,” Harper said. A representative from the United Automobile Workers successfully fought to save his job, and Matthew eventually recovered enough to return to work. Matthew, who is thirty, was on medical leave for a year and had to move in with Harper. Doctors began treating him with a succession of drugs. Six years ago, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and soon after went temporarily blind in one eye and became paralyzed on his left side because of lesions on his brain and spine. Harper, who has long chestnut hair and matching rose tattoos on her forearms, was even more worried about her son, Matthew, who also works at the plant. “Everybody always talks about how we get paid too much money, but they don’t focus on how bad our bodies are beat down.”
![master of orion on strike master of orion on strike](https://i.imgur.com/qKXD7Ob.jpg)
“I never had any health problems as far as my back or my hands prior to coming to General Motors,” she said. She’s glad for the higher wages, but she now commutes an hour and a half each way to work, and the job has taken a physical toll in addition to her bad back, she has arthritis in her hands from bending two-inch-thick wire harnesses hundreds of times a day. Previously she had worked as a medical assistant, taking care of newborn babies, but earned only a little more than twelve dollars an hour. Harper started working at the plant in 2012 and now makes about twenty-two dollars an hour. “I had to hurry up and call the hospital so I wouldn’t get charged a thousand dollars for cancelling.” Harper, who has two herniated disks and two bulging disks in her spine, had an appointment the next morning for an epidural, to relieve her pain. Roxanne Harper, a forty-eight-year-old assembly-line worker at the General Motors plant in Lake Orion, Michigan, was walking the picket line on September 16th when she found out that the company had abruptly terminated the health insurance of the more than forty-eight thousand G.M.