Spring Hill, where workers hit picket lines Saturday, is a key facility that would have brought down other GM factories had its workers stayed on strike. General Motors and Ford workers in Canada have already voted to ratify a three-year contract agreement with the company. He gave a thumbs-up and said: “I think it’s great.”Īlso Monday, 8,200 Stellantis workers in Canada represented by a different union, Unifor, briefly went on strike before reaching a deal that comes with base hourly wage increases of nearly 20 percent for production workers. President Joe Biden was asked about the deal Monday, as he boarded Air Force One back to the White House. GM was the last company to reach a deal, and it came after nearly 4,000 union workers walked out of GM’s largest North American plant, in Spring Hill, Tennessee, by surprise on Saturday night. “This time it wasn’t bad, because I knew what to expect,” she said. As word came down of a deal, she and other UAW members worked to disassemble a tent that strikers had used. This marked Marshall’s second strike against GM, having walked picket lines in 2019. “Christmas, Thanksgiving, the New Year - that’ll help,” she said of her expected raise. Shammira Marshall, a forklift driver at GM’s parts warehouse in Van Buren Township, Michigan, west of Detroit, said the holidays will be a bit nicer this year thanks to the tentative deal. “And if we do turn it down, we’ll be ready to go back again.” “We were ready to continue if we needed to,” Huerta said. With workers huddled around a fire behind him, Huerta said that it’s been a tough few nights on the picket lines with dropping temperatures and rain, but that spirits have remained high. They’re going to present us with something and then we get to tell them it was good enough or it wasn’t,” said Huerta. Mike Huerta, president of UAW Local 602, which was on strike in Lansing, Michigan, was hesitant to celebrate the deal before seeing more information, saying that “the devil’s in the details.” However, workers were expected to start returning to work as early as Monday. That didn’t happen, as workers at Spring Hill and about 18,000 others on strike at GM assembly plants and parts warehouses awaited official word of the agreement Monday from the union. Initally Fain wanted 40% raises and even asked for a 32-hour work week for 40 hours of pay, but he didn’t get all of his demands.ĭuring the talks, which began last summer, the companies said they were reluctant to agree to the union’s terms, fearing they would force them to raise vehicle prices higher than competitors with nonunion factories in the U.S., including Toyota and Tesla.įor GM, which was losing millions of dollars each week the strike lasted, the impetus was clear: Reach a deal so it could open an SUV factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee, on time Monday morning, and get a highly profitable truck-based SUV plant in Arlington, Tennessee, back online as soon as possible. Most industry analysts say contracts with the Detroit Three are victories for the UAW, which had sought big gains to make up for concessions it made to help the companies get through the Great Recession of late-2007 to 2009. The GM deal should make Fain’s birthday a happy one. Workers would get an immediate 11% pay raise upon ratification. Members could still vote down the contracts, but it’s likely they would bring labor peace to the domestic auto industry, at least until they’d expire on April 30, 2028.Īll three companies agreed to raise general wages by 25 percent for top assembly plant workers and add cost of living adjustments that would bring their pay increases to over 30 percent by the time the contracts end, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly about the deal. Ford agreed to a new contract last week and was followed by Stellantis on Saturday, which raised the pressure on GM to settle for essentially the same terms. The tentative deal, which came on Fain’s 55th birthday, capped a furious few days of agreements that still need to be ratified by 146,000 UAW members at GM, Ford and Jeep-maker Stellantis. Joined by manufacturing chief Gerald Johnson at the meeting that started late Sunday, they were able to close a deal with UAW President Shawn Fain and other bargainers early Monday that should end a contentious six-week work stoppage, three people briefed on the matter said Monday. Facing the loss of another $200 million this week to a lengthy strike, General Motors CEO Mary Barra wrapped up her weekend by going to the United Auto Workers’ Detroit headquarters intent on getting a new contract.
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