Week of reckoning for GM, UAW

https://www.autonews.com/manufacturing/week-reckoning-gm-uaw|October 23 , 2019

DETROIT — A proposed contract with General Motors that more than 46,000 UAW members are voting on this week contains lucrative bonuses and wage gains, but it doesn't bring any production from Mexico to the U.S. or save three plants that shut down this year.
The UAW's national strike against the automaker will extend at least through Friday, Oct. 25, as the tentative agreement GM reached last week with union leaders goes to the rank and file for ratification.

UAW officials are touting the fact that the deal addresses many top priorities: wage increases, a path to permanent employment for temporary workers, no increase in health care costs and a shorter wait for new hires to earn top wages. Full-time hourly workers would receive bonuses of $11,000 and 4 percent of their annual pay shortly after ratifying the contract.

"A lot now depends on how they explain it to members and how transparent they are," Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., told Automotive News.

But the UAW's failure to save Lordstown Assembly in Ohio and two transmission plants in Michigan and Maryland has put many members on edge and could complicate ratification. If the deal passes, the UAW would then use it as a framework for contracts with Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

"You really never walk away completely satisfied," said a member of the UAW's GM council who asked not to be identified. "You hope and pray your membership understands."

The GM council's decision last week to endorse the contract but continue the strike to at least 40 days is an unusual move for the union, but if UAW members return to work and then reject the contract, "the leverage is gone," said Art Schwartz, a former GM negotiator who's now president of Labor and Economics Associates.

An additional week of the strike will result in $400 million in operating losses for GM, according to an estimate from Anderson Economic Group, a consulting firm in East Lansing, Mich. The firm estimates that it will cost the striking workers a total of $14 million in wages per day and laid-off supplier employees $20.5 million a day.

Even if UAW members were to send their leaders back to the bargaining table, GM is unlikely to reverse its decision to shut down the three plants, Schwartz said.

"The union tried their very best to keep those plants open. Basically, they got a lot of money and other benefits to [treat] the wound," he said. "How can they get all that stuff and reopen the plants as well?"

Plant closures, investments

Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly is the only one of four U.S. plants GM targeted for closure last fall that would remain open under the agreement. The 53-year-old Lordstown plant that President Donald Trump and other politicians had lobbied GM to spare would be officially closed for good. A parts distribution center in Fontana, Calif., that employs 31 hourly and 24 salaried workers also would close, the agreement says.

Under the proposed contract, GM would spend $5.7 billion to create or retain about 9,000 jobs at four U.S. plants and its suburban Detroit tech center through 2023, plus $2 billion to refurbish other unspecified plants.

The automaker also is aiming for $1.3 billion in indirect investments — resulting in up to 1,400 jobs in and around Lordstown related to battery-cell and electric pickup manufacturing — bringing total spending to $9 billion. The Lordstown investments are not part of the tentative agreement with the UAW.

GM agreed to invest $3 billion in Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly to build electric trucks, vans and battery modules, according to language in the proposed contract. The plant, which was scheduled to close in January, would employ 2,225 people at full capacity, GM told the union.

TOM WOROBEC

Workers on strike at Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly last week. The tentative agreement would save the plant from closure.

GM also pledged investments in next-generation midsize pickups in Wentzville, Mo., next-generation utility vehicles in Lansing, Mich., and Spring Hill, Tenn., and preproduction operations in Warren, Mich. The contract does not discuss moving any production from Mexico to the U.S.

The $7.7 billion in direct investments represents a decline from the $8.3 billion GM pledged in the 2015 labor contract. The 2015 commitments touched 12 plants but amounted to smaller investments at each one.