Platform:Perhaps it was inevitable that there would be a strike this year against one of the "Big Three" car companies - General Motors (GM), Ford and Chrysler, writes Steven Pearlstein

With the companies losing money and market share in the US, and with the ranks of the United Auto Workers (UAW) shrinking fast, this looked to be the contract that would set a new framework for collective bargaining in the car industry. And with so much at stake, why wouldn't a union look for a chance to play its trump card and gain just a bit of advantage before coming to an agreement?

After all, a strike makes it possible for an angry workforce to let off steam about all the concessions it has already made and easier for the union leadership to sell a contract that is bound to meet opposition from militant locals.

By the same token, a strike could help management convince Wall Street that it held its ground on getting costs in line with those of foreign firms operating in the US. And as long as the economy is slowing and there is plenty of inventory sitting on dealer and factory lots, a short strike now need be no more costly than two-week plant shutdowns in December.

So it's not the strike against GM that concerns me as much as the reported reason for it - namely, the union's insistence that this contract, like those before, offers ironclad job security. Given what's gone on in the last 25 years, you have to wonder how anyone could think that GM, Ford or Chrysler are in a position to guarantee anything, let alone job security.

More broadly, what the strike suggests is that, even when a contract is eventually signed, it won't involve the kind of sweeping changes that the Big Three need to ensure their competitive viability.

"By and large, they are looking for answers to the wrong question," said Barry Bluestone, an economist and labour expert at Northeastern University in Boston. "They are fighting over the same things they were fighting over 50 years ago."

Bluestone is no stranger to the car industry. Indeed, his father, Irving Bluestone (91), was the lead negotiator for the UAW with GM in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the early 1990s, father and son wrote a book, Negotiating the Future, in which they argued that both unions and companies had to move their focus from dividing the pie to expanding it.

That meant putting aside the notion that the role of unions was to fight for better wages and benefits, and the role of management was to run the company. To stay competitive, firms had to engage the energies of their workers. And that required a different approach to collective bargaining.

As Bluestone acknowledges, this wasn't a wholly original idea, but one that had been a favourite of the left wing of the labour movement in the 1940s and championed by the UAW's own Walter Reuther until 1950, when he surrendered the dream of industrial democracy for the more fetching and immediate dream of a middle-class life for blue-collar workers.

That grand bargain, known as the Treaty of Detroit, served both sides well until the early 1980s, when foreign competition began to render it unsustainable. And yet, in the 25 years since, little has changed in the collective bargaining process.

In the late 1980s, there were some successful experiments with Total Quality programmes borrowed from Japan. And GM had some early success with its new-age Saturn division. But according to Ruth Milkman, a labour expert at UCLA, worker involvement was never really embraced by the unions or management and never allowed to rise beyond production issues on the factory floor. As long as oil prices remained low and SUV profits high, neither union nor management seemed to care.

The environment has changed, but labour relations remain much as they were in 1950. To their credit, both sides have reportedly agreed to cap GM's financial obligation for retiree healthcare by shifting that responsibility to the union, along with billions of dollars in cash and a fixed annual contribution by the company.

But given the magnitude of its legacy costs and the real threat of bankruptcy, you'd think GM's workers would also be open to taking control of their pension assets and liabilities.

The battle over job security is also emblematic. With more than a quarter of GM's 73,000 unionised workers set to retire in the next few years, any job reductions that result from falling sales or increased productivity should be able to be handled through attrition. But the union is also worried that this might not be the case if the company decides to outsource entire functions.

By now, it should be apparent that the wrong way to handle this legitimate concern is to prohibit all layoffs, plant closures or outsourcing. The right way would be to leave those out of the labour contract but give workers a real voice in those decisions and a financial stake in making the right ones.

Getting there would be hard. It would require, not only new procedures, but a much higher degree of trust and respect.

But it would be a more hopeful sign if this strike were about hammering out a new model for labour-management relations rather than merely preserving job guarantees that no company can - or should - provide.