One of the most prominent symbols of the challenges of the US auto industry is coming to an end, at least for GM, as the company is pulling the plug on the controversial jobs bank program.

The move was required in the deal made with GM to receive federal financing, most commonly referred to as a “bailout,” and today the UAW publicly acquiesced to the move, though the union would have had to give its OK to the move earlier as part of the bailout deal.

With the move, some 1600 workers currently receiving near full pay to go to various halls and play cards, read or otherwise keep themselves occupied, will no longer be in the program. Now, those workers will have to rely on unemployment insurance and some supplemental benefits that GM offers to laid-off workers. Combined, those benefits can still reach over 70% of base pay (versus nearly 100% for jobs bank employees), but the government will be picking up some of that tab, and those benefits comes to an end at some point, unlike the perpetual jobs bank.

Last week, the UAW also agreed to end an end of the jobs bank program at Chrysler.

A big question now is what will happen with Ford, which has not yet accepted the federal loans, and hence is not bound by their terms. So for now, it still has a jobs bank, but is signaling it expects parity from the UAW from any contract terms given to GM and Chrysler.

To many observers the jobs bank program was a stark example of the broken nature of the Detroit automakers business troubles, and a burden that the global automakers competing in the US and even manufacturing cars here did not carry. The US transplants are not unionized in the US, though they may be in their own countries, such as Mercedes-Bends workers in Germany.