Deal won’t immediately end strike of 49,000 car workers that began on 16 September
General Motors assembly workers picket outside the company’s Bowling Green plant during the United Auto Workers (UAW) national strike in Bowling Green, Kentucky, earlier this month.
Photograph: Bryan Woolston/Reuters
General Motors and the United Auto Workers union have reached a tentative deal that could end a month-long strike by more than 49,000 car workers.
The deal was hammered out Wednesday but it won’t immediately end the strike. Workers are likely to stay on the picket lines at least a few more days until union committees vote on the deal. The entire membership also must vote.
Details of the four-year agreement have yet to be released.
Workers left their jobs early on 16 September. They wanted a bigger share of GM’s profits, job security and a path to permanent jobs for temporary workers.
The company wanted to reduce labor costs so they’re closer to US factories run by foreign automakers.
GM received about $50bn from US taxpayers when it went bankrupt at the height of the last recession, with the government eventually losing $11bn on the deal. GM workers suffered too as pay was frozen, more “temporary” workers were brought on at lower wages and facilities closed.
GM has pulled in over $25bn in profits over the last two years, while chief executive Mary Berra’s $22m 2018 salary was 281 times that of the median GM worker.
If approved, the contract agreement will set the pattern for negotiations at Fiat Chrysler and Ford. It wasn’t clear which company the union would bargain with next, or whether there would be another strike.
The union’s International Executive Board first has to vote on the GM deal, then union leaders from factories will travel to Detroit for a vote on Thursday. The earliest date workers could return would be after that.
In past years, it’s taken a minimum of three or four days and as long as several weeks for the national ratification vote. Workers took almost two weeks to finish voting on their last GM agreement, in October of 2015. Then, skilled trades workers rejected it, causing further delays.
This time around, with a federal corruption investigation that has implicated the past two UAW presidents and brought convictions of five union officials, many union members don’t trust the leadership and likely won’t want to return to work until they’ve gotten a chance to vote on the deal themselves.
In August, the FBI raided the suburban Detroit home of the UAW president Gary Jones. He has not been charged and has not commented on the raid. Earlier this month, Jones’ successor as union regional director in Missouri was charged in a $600,000 embezzlement scheme, and another UAW official pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks from union vendors.
Eight other people, including five UAW officials, have been convicted over the past two years of looting a jointly run Fiat Chrysler-UAW training center for blue-collar workers. Another official was charged in September.
There’s also no guarantee that the first contract deal with GM will pass. Some workers on the picket lines said they may not vote for the first offer.
“We’re not just going to take the first thing that they give us,” worker Tina Black said in September from the picket line at an engine and transmission plant in Romulus, Michigan, near Detroit’s main airport.
But Louis Rocha, president of a UAW local in Orion Township, Michigan, said recently that union bargainers have taken strong positions against the company. “I think we’re going to be OK,” he said of the ratification vote.
The strike had shut down 33 GM manufacturing plants in nine states across the US. It was the first national strike by the union since a two-day walkout in 2007 that had little impact on the company.