ABSTRACT
On November 20, 2019, GM escalated the legal controversy surrounding the alleged conspiracy between FCA and the UAW to reshape the collective bargaining relationship to the competitive advantage of the company at the expense of its competitors. GM filed a civil RICO suit against FCA for having engaged in racketeering for this purpose. It provided evidence of the efforts by a few top FCA executives to bribe UAW officials to curry favor to make the company a more financially attractive partner for merger. The civil RICO suit alleges that FCA-initiated racketeering activities effectively turned the company into a corrupt “enterprise” which in turn corrupted the UAW to participate. The union’s participation involved the receipt of millions of dollars in charge backs to subsidize its operations during a period of financial difficult, as reported in an earlier chapter. At the time of this writing, a federal district judge had dismissed the original RICO suit, but GM filed an amended suit on August 3, 2020, which the same judge dismissed. GM has appealed the dismissal to a US Court of Appeals.
