by Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor
The UAW and General Motors have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract. Details of the deal will be released Tuesday morning, but:According to people familiar with the deal, it offers a $5,000 signing bonus, a modest pay increase—$3 an hour over four years—for lower-wage workers hired after September 2007 and a change in profit-sharing, based on North American results, not just those for the U.S. GM also is said to have agreed to add thousands of jobs and reopen the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn."I'm willing to take a chance on profit-sharing, because it's better than nothing," said Andy Bohner, who works at GM's Flint truck assembly plant. "But," he noted, "I'd rather see a straight performance bonus," which represented a certain percentage of annual wages in years past.
Workers will vote to accept or reject the contract in the next 10 days. Due to a no-strike agreement made as part of the government helping the auto companies avert bankruptcy in 2009, if there is no agreement on a contract, it will go to binding arbitration.
According to a UAW statement:
"When GM was struggling, our members shared in the sacrifice. Now that the company is posting profits again, our members want to share in the success. To be clear, GM is prosperous because of its workers. It's the workers and the quality of the work they do, along with the sacrifices they made, that have returned this company to profitability," said UAW Vice President Joe Ashton, who directs the union's General Motors Department. "The wages and benefits we negotiated in this tentative agreement reflect the fact that it was UAW members who helped turn this company around.
The GM agreement is expected to be used as the basis for agreements with Chrysler and Ford. Since Ford is not part of the 2009 deal, its workers could strike and negotiations are expected to go more slowly, so Chrysler is likely to follow the GM deal.
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