This is not how contract negotiations usually proceed. Normally, there is lots of angry ranting and raving from the unions but the Big Three automakers usually don’t say a lot in public for fear of kicking a hornet’s nest.

But Ford is playing things a little differently this time around. Last week the company announced that its latest offer to the UAW is the “limit” of what it can do. The UAW says that’s not true and has already shut down one of Ford’s truck manufacturing plants, i.e. something closer to the core of Ford’s business, to punish them for not upping their offer more.

Yesterday Ford’s executive chairman Bill Ford, who is the great-great grandson of Henry Ford, gave a little speech in which he did his best to suggest the UAW was now at the point of doing more harm than good.

“Today, as the UAW strike against Ford continues, we are at a crossroads,” he said. “This is about the future of the American automobile industry,” he added. “The UAW leaders have called us the enemy in these negotiations but I will never consider our employees as enemies. This should not be Ford vs. the UAW. It should be Ford and the UAW vs. Toyota, Honda, Tesla and all the Chinese companies that want to enter our home market.

“Toyota, Honda, Tesla and the others are loving this strike because they know the longer it goes on the better it is for them. They will win and all of us will lose.” He went on to say that if this happened “America loses.”

Just need to interject here for a moment to point out that Toyota and Honda are Japanese automakers who build some of their cars here in the US using US labor. Chinese companies would love to get into the US market but so far they haven’t made a dent. That leaves Tesla in this list, a company which is every bit as American an automaker as Ford. So it’s a bit of a stretch to say that if Tesla wins, America loses.

“I haven’t spoken publicly since these negotiations began,” Ford said. He then said that he’d worked with every UAW leader in the past several decades and described himself as the “most pro-union leader in our industry.” “Ford is the strongest partner the UAW has ever known. These are choices we made and it has added costs to our business in an industry that is extraordinarily competitive,” he said.

That set up his pitch, which was that now is the time to wrap the “acrimonious” talks and come to an agreement that would set Ford in a strong position moving forward. But he also warned that expanding the strike would cripple the supply chain in ways that weren’t easily fixed later on. Bill Ford is pleading with the UAW to accept what is being offered as a win rather than plunge the company into further chaos.

None of this seems to have made any impact on UAW leader Shawn Fain who not only rejected the appeal but lied about what Bill Ford said.

UAW President Shawn Fain countered Ford’s plea by ratcheting up the pressure.

“Bill Ford knows exactly how to settle this strike. Instead of threatening to close the Rouge, he should call up [Ford CEO] Jim Farley, tell him to stop playing games and get a deal done, or we’ll close the Rouge for him,” he said in a statement. “It’s not the UAW and Ford against foreign automakers. It’s autoworkers everywhere against corporate greed. If Ford wants to be the all-American auto company, they can pay all-American wages and benefits. Workers at Tesla, Toyota, Honda, and others are not the enemy — they’re the UAW members of the future.”

Ford did not threaten to close the Rouge Complex in his remarks. He did mention if American carmakers such as Ford lose to the competition, then jobs, future investments and “factories like the one we are in today” will be lost.

It’s not Ford that is making threats and closing plants, that’s the UAW. As for workers at other automakers being “the UAW members of the future” that doesn’t seem likely. Many of these companies are building cars in right-to-work states. That means that even if the UAW were to unionize these sites, people who don’t want to be part of the union can still opt out of paying dues to the union. Unions have been on the decline in the US for decades. Big talk about unionizing other shops doesn’t change the trendlines which have been basically flat for the UAW over the past 15 years.

It seems to me that the UAW is going to keep pushing for more simply because they’ve built up this conflict so much they can’t settle for anything short of a maximum offer. I guess we’ll see if that plan works out for them or if they just wind up doing more harm than good.

Update: Here’s the full speech.