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Union workers in Lordstown, Ohio, are livid that they agreed to make $118 million a year in annual concessions to save the plant in mid 2017, only to have GM effectively threaten to close it down a year and a half later, Bloomberg News reported. Unless GM reverses its course, Lordstown will fall victim to the harsh reality that fewer consumers are buying small cars and that Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra is hyper focused on doing business only where GM can earn big returns. GM idled the plant in March saying demand for the Cruze was too weak to continue. In an email, GM spokesman Dan Flores said that the union agreed to many concessions, but that they didn’t address the realities the company faces. The problem isn’t high wages, it’s falling sales — and GM’s post-bankruptcy cash flow discipline. “We didn’t discontinue the Cruze because of something the local union did or didn’t do,” Flores wrote. “It was a market-driven decision to discontinue the Cruze, and there were no products to allocate to Lordstown.”

Retirees of Delphi Corp. lost a long-running lawsuit attempting to hold the federal pension insurance agency liable for its 2009 takeover of their pension plans, Bloomberg Law reported. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC)  didn’t need court approval before it terminated the Delphi pension plans and assumed liability for the benefits of about 70,000 workers and retirees, Senior Judge Arthur J. Tarnow of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan held March 22. The retirees said that the PBGC should have used its negotiating leverage with General Motors Corp.—which owned Delphi before a 1999 corporate spin-off—to force GM to assume their pension liability. Tarnow disagreed, saying GM “repeatedly, and emphatically” declined to assume the Delphi pension liability. Judge Tarnow’s order, which granted summary judgment to the PBGC, also found the plan termination didn’t constitute a breach of fiduciary duty. That’s because the PBGC owed no fiduciary duties to the Delphi retirees until after the plan terminated and the PBGC became the plan sponsor, Judge Tarnow said.

Business groups expect the Labor Department’s forthcoming overtime proposal to be more palatable than rules sought by the prior administration, but worker advocates say it doesn’t go far enough to protect Americans when they work more than 40 hours a week, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Labor Department is expected to release its proposed rule as soon as this month. It would set a new salary threshold, below which, in most cases, workers must be paid time-and-a-half regardless of their role in the firm. Interest groups and labor attorneys expect the level to be near $35,000 a year. That would be an increase from the $23,660 threshold set in 2004, the last time it was raised, but be below the $47,476-a-year level President Obama’s administration sought in 2016. A federal judge halted that rule from being implemented in December 2016.