The deadline for the UAW strike has been set for Friday

GM, Stellantis and the Auto Workers of the United Auto Workers: The Strike on September 22nd, 2016, and How to Join the Suggestions

“If we don’t get better offers… then we’re going to have to amp this thing up even more,” warned UAW President Shawn Fain on CBS’s Face Of The Nation.

On the other, are the Big three automakers — General Motors, Ford and Stellantis — who say they have put historically generous offers on the table, while also emphasizing that there are limits.

“Our goal is to secure a sustainable future that provides all our UAW-represented employees with an opportunity to thrive in a company that will be competitive during the automotive industry’s historic transformation,” Stellantis said in a statement.

The paint shop at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant are on strike, and so the 600 workers who work in the body construction department were told not to report to work.

GM has warned it will lay off 2,000 workers at a plant in Kansas early this week because it lacks components supplied by GM’s Wentzville, Mo., plant, which is on strike.

The historic strike kicked off right after the stroke of midnight on Friday morning with 9% of the UAW’s nearly 150,000 union members walking off their jobs. The three auto plants — a General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Mo., a Stellantis assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, and part of a Ford plant in Wayne, Mich. — were the first join the picket lines.

But because in this case it’s due to a strike, the companies say there is no such compensation. General Motors said in a statement, “We are working under an expired agreement at Fairfax. There is no provision that allows for company-supplied Sub-pay.

As autoworkers enter a fifth day of strikes at plants in Missouri, Michigan and Ohio, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has set a new deadline in the contract talks.

“If we don’t make serious progress by noon on Friday, September 22nd, more locals will be called on to stand up and join the strike,” he announced in a video posted to Facebook Monday night, while not revealing which plants or how many would be called on next.

“We have a long way to go, and if the company doesn’t respect the demands of our workers, then we will escalate action,” Fain told NPR earlier on Monday.

Labor historians think this new strategy is a reflection of new militancy at the UAW, and also some thinking about how to put pressure on companies while maintaining flexibility.

“It’s not the goal of the UAW to bring down Ford, GM and Chrysler,” says Erik Loomis, professor of history at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes. “That’s not the point. The goal is to get a good deal out of them.

While it’s too soon to say whether the strategy will work, it appears that the unions are on top of the situation and companies are having to guess which parts of their supply chain might be hit next.

Already, there have been ripple effects impacting non-striking workers. On Friday, Ford put 600 workers on temporary layoff, because they need to use materials that need to be coated by the paint department, which is on strike.

The UAW said that laid off workers would be paid the same wages as striking workers. For most auto workers, that’s less than half of their weekly earnings.

Striking workers could be sent back to their jobs while others are brought out if the union burns through its strike fund too quickly.

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Sharon Block is the Executive Director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.