Vote on UAW, GM agreement too close to call

Passage at large Texas plant helps offset failure elsewhere

DETROIT — Voting on a tentative contract agreement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers union that ended a six-week strike against the company appears too close to call after the latest tallies at several GM factories were announced Wednesday.

The union hasn’t posted final vote totals yet, but workers at several large factories who finished voting in the past few days have rejected the deal by fairly large margins. However a factory in Arlington, Texas, with about 5,000 workers voted more than 60% to approve the deal in tallies announced Wednesday.

The vote tracker on the UAW’s website Wednesday shows the deal ahead by 958 votes. But those totals do not include votes from GM assembly plants in Fort Wayne, Ind.; Lansing Delta Township, Mich., and a powertrain plant in Toledo, Ohio, which all voted against the agreement, according to local union officials.

In most cases the vote tallies ranged from 55% to around 60% against the contract.

But in Arlington the vote was 63% in favor with 60.4% of production workers approving the deal and nearly 65% of skilled trades workers voting in favor, making the tally tight with GM voting set to wrap up today.

Spokesmen for both the union and General Motors declined comment while the voting continues.

It wasn’t clear what would happen next, but local union officials don’t expect an immediate walkout if the contract is rejected.

“The UAW will face serious questions if members at one of the companies vote down the agreement,” said Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University. “Specifically, the union will need to decide

whether to send the workers out on strike, perhaps on a company-wide basis. Second, if the union goes back to the table to renegotiate with one company, how does it maintain the pattern across the three? Last, how does it convince the workers who rejected the contract that it has made the maximum effort to get the most that can be obtained from the company?”

Masters said a rejection of the GM contract would cause UAW President Shawn Fain to “put the brakes” on the union’s foreign auto plants organizing efforts.

“He will not be able to focus on just immediately transferring his energy and resources to organizing the transplants,” the Wayne State expert said. “And also he will have some explaining to do, because the people at the transplants are going to be looking at this.”

On Tuesday, Fain touted what the UAW was able to achieve for autoworkers during a U.S. Senate hearing, where he also pushed for unionization at foreign automakers.

“On Sept. 14, UAW launched our stand-up strike. It was a new strategy to take on corporate greed at GM, Ford and Stellantis, which is Chrysler’s parent company, and allow us to integrate our members into a national campaign where worker strikes strategically grew and escalated over time, giving our union bargaining team maximum power to negotiate record contracts for the first time in our history,” Fain said at the hearing.

“We struck at all three companies in less than seven weeks. We want justice for our members and other workers. We won things our industry hasn’t seen in over 15 years, victories that will instantly change people’s lives overnight.”

Voting continues at Ford through early Saturday, where the deal is passing with 66.1% voting in favor so far with only a few large factories still counting.

The contract was passing overwhelmingly at Jeep maker Stellantis, where voting continues until Tuesday. The union’s vote tracker on Wednesday showed that 79.5% voted in favor with many large factories yet to finish.

Workers at some smaller GM facilities have yet to vote, and final tallies are expected to be announced late today.

Keith Crowell, the local union president in Arlington, said the plant has a diverse group of workers from fulland part-time temporary hires to longtime assembly line employees. Full-time temporary workers liked the large raises they received and the chance to get top union pay, he said. But many longtime workers didn’t think the immediate 11% pay raises were enough to make up for concessions granted to the company in 2008, he said.

“There was something in there for everybody, but everybody couldn’t get everything they wanted,” Crowell said. “At least we’re making a step in the right direction to recover from 2008.”

The union agreed to accept lower pay for new hires and gave up cost of living adjustments and general annual pay raises in 2008 to help the automakers out of dire financial problems during the 2007-2009 recession. GM and Chrysler (now Stellantis), went into government-funded bankruptcies.

In the contracts with all three automakers, longtime workers will get 25% general raises over the life of the deals with 11% up front. Including cost of living adjustments, they’ll get about 33%, the union said.

The contract took steps toward ending lower tiers of wages for newer hires, reducing the number of years it takes to reach top pay. Many newer hires wanted defined benefit pension plans instead of 401(k) retirement plans. But the company agreed to contribute 10% per year into the 401(k) instead.

At other factories, local union officials said that longtime workers at GM were unhappy that they didn’t get larger pay raises like newer workers, and they wanted a larger pension increase.

Tony Totty, president of the union local at the Toledo powertrain plant, said the environment is right to seek more from the company.

“We need to take advantage of the moment,” he said. “Who knows what the next environment will be for national agreements. The company never has a problem telling us we need to take concessions in bad economic times. Why should we not get the best economic agreement in good economic times?”

At a GM pickup factory in Flint, Mich., which voted 51.8% against the contract, worker Tommy Wolikow said more senior workers should have gotten bigger raises because newer hires and temporary workers got a lot more. “This wage thing, it’s just not cutting it,” he said. Still, he said the contract is close and he’d go for it with a few small additions.

Wolikow, hired by GM in 2008, said he was happy with a 10% annual company contribution to his 401(k) plan rather than a defined benefit pension.

Stephanie Riley, a 17-year GM employee at the Flint plant, voted no on the tentative agreement.

“The bottom line is that traditional members feel like we’ve been waiting forever for a fair contract,” Riley said in a statement. “And though we are very happy that the tiers and temps are being brought up to full wage, we are tired of taking the back-burner. Our wages haven’t reflected inflation in a long time. And a lot of us are really feeling the effects of an inflated economy.”

Pensions were also a sticking point at the Toledo and Arlington plants. Totty said that while workers got 25% raises, pension benefits were only improved by 9.4%, leading older workers to reject the propose contract.

“The deal is better for someone who doesn’t yet work here than it is for someone who worked here 30 years because there isn’t enough in the pensions,” he said.

In Arlington, the pension increase was also key for older workers, said Keith Crowell, shop committee chairman for Local 276, which represents hourly employees there. Workers of all seniority levels were hoping for retiree health care plans, he said.

Thousands of UAW members joined picket lines in targeted strikes against Detroit automakers over a six-week stretch before tentative deals were reached late last month. Rather than striking at one company, the union targeted individual plants at all three automakers.

At its peak last month about 46,000 of the union’s 146,000 workers at the Detroit companies were walking picket lines.