General Motors gave Tiffany Heiman four hours off, not a whole day, to help her decide if she wanted to accept the offer for a higher paying job in Kentucky. It would mean moving her family from Lockport, NY, where she worked at a parts supplier, in order to take a job on the Bowling Green Corvette assembly line.

She worked half the shift, during which she could build about 150 truck radiators from scratch. Then she flew to Kentucky with her eight-month-old daughter, drove around for a few hours, and decided the extra six dollars an hour she would make there would be worth it. Almost as soon as she actually transplanted there a few weeks later, after working every day for a month straight, she and her husband realized they were expecting another baby and were grateful for her higher wage. Their baby needed a few extra checkups along the way. Then the plant went on strike and GM dropped health care benefits for its employees, the fifty thousand workers whose walkout has halted its US production since last week.

She had to cancel the baby’s appointments because she couldn’t afford to pay the full amount up front. “It’s a right-to-work state down here,” she said, referring to the anti-union climate in Kentucky. GM offered her a 2 percent raise, a benefit of $96 per month. But they asked employees to pay an additional 15 percent of their own health care costs, which, in her case, works out to $230 per month.