The United Automobile Workers union, an icon of organized labor in the United States, is battling to preserve jobs and benefits at teetering US automakers General Motors Corp and Chrysler with a losing hand.

"The UAW is not going to be a part of the final solution. They are dead meat," said Bill Adams, chief executive of Adams, Nash, Haskell and Sheridan, a labor relations consulting company in Erlanger, Kentucky.

Even if fellow unions were to rally around the UAW, it would not change the outcome, Adams said.