Union says GM strike will go on until workers vote

DETROIT — Leaders of union locals voted Thursday to approve a tentative contract agreement with General Motors, but said a strike against the automaker would continue until workers voted to ratify the deal.

After a lengthy meeting in Detroit, the group said voting by the 49,000 members of the United Automobile Workers at GM plants would begin Saturday and be completed within a week.

The walkout, now a month old, is the longest against General Motors in half a century.

According to a summary posted online by the union, the fouryear deal reached Wednesday includes wage increases and a formula for allowing temporary workers to become fulltime employees.

It would also keep open the DetroitHamtramck plant, which GM had said it would close.

The tentative agreement does not reverse plans for three plants where production has ceased, including one in Lordstown, Ohio, though it provides retirement incentives for workers displaced there.

GM has promised to invest $7.7 billion in its manufacturing operations in the United States over the next four years and $1.3 billion more in ventures with partners, saying those moves would create or preserve 9,000 jobs. But the deal includes no specific promises to expand domestic production or to move manufacturing to the United States from Mexico, both of which were goals of the union going into the negotiations.

If the contract is ratified, each fullfledged UAW worker will receive a signing bonus of $11,000, a 3% wage increase in the second and fourth years of the contract, and a 4% lump sum in the first and third years. Temporary workers get a signing bonus of $4,500, the same wage increases as fulltime workers, and the possibility of becoming permanent employees within three years.

The deal also eliminates a $12,000 cap on annual profitsharing payouts, which could have a significant upside if GM continues to be as profitable as it has been in recent years.

Health care benefits are unchanged, with workers paying about 3% of the cost.

When it announced the tentative accord Wednesday, the UAW said it had “achieved major wins.” But ratification is not a foregone conclusion. The last time the union negotiated a contract with GM, in 2015, approval was delayed for a month in part because the automaker’s skilledtrades workers rejected the terms.

A rejection of the proposed contract would be a rebuke for the UAW president, Gary Jones, and his negotiating team.

“If the rankandfile vote down an agreement their leaders send them, they also are voting down the leaders,” said Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan who follows the auto industry. “Workers may ask whether it was worth being out of work a month to get a deal that could be close to what they would have gotten with no strike and no loss of pay.”

There were signs of dissent from union members outside the Renaissance Center office complex, where GM is headquartered and the contract negotiations took place. As the roughly 200 union officials who will vote on the proposed contract arrived for the meeting, they were greeted by about 30 workers from the Lordstown plant in red Tshirts shouting, “Vote no!”

“If we don’t have product in Lordstown, we want them to vote no on this contract,” said Anthony Naples, a father of five who worked for 25 years at the Lordstown plant. “Now our jobs are going away. They have to figure out a way to get product in the U.S.”