General Motors reaches deal with UAW, ending weeks-long strike

General Motors and the United Auto Workers union have reached a tentative contract agreement that could end a six-week-old strike against Detroit automakers, the union and company said Monday.

The deal follows the pattern set with Ford last week and Jeep maker Stellantis over the weekend.

The agreements will last four years and eight months and include 25-per-cent general pay raises and cost-of-living adjustments. Combined, they bring the wage increase to more than 30 per cent over the life of the contract.

The contract with GM will essentially be the same as the ones reached with the other two automakers but will have differences.

GM eager to open Tennessee plant

GM was the last company to reach a deal, and the union added a factory in Tennessee to the strike list on Saturday in an effort to turn up the pressure. The UAW reached a tentative agreement last week with Ford, and it wasted no time in hitting GM where it hurts financially.

Nearly 4,000 unionized workers on Saturday walked out of GM’s largest North American plant, in Spring Hill, Tenn., hours after the deal with Stellantis was announced. They join about 14,000 GM workers already striking at factories in Texas, Michigan and Missouri.

Spring Hill produces the engines for vehicles assembled at nine plants as far afield as Mexico, including Silverado and Sierra pickups. It’s a big money-maker for GM that amplifies the company’s financial pain after workers walked off the job last week in Arlington, Texas — where full-size SUVs, including the Tahoe and Suburban, are produced. Vehicles assembled at the Spring Hill plant include the electric Cadillac Lyriq, GMC Acadia and Cadillac crossover SUVs.

Union praises ‘historical’ deal

Presidents of the Ford union locals voted unanimously in Detroit on Sunday to endorse that tentative contract after UAW president Shawn Fain explained its details, the union tweeted.

As he explained the particulars to the full membership in a later livestream, Fain, along with Chuck Browning, the UAW’s vice-president, said the deal represents a “historical inflection point” for reviving union power in the United States, where “we were being left behind by an economy that only works for the billionaire class.”

“UAW members at Ford will receive more in straight general wage increases over the next 4½ years than we have over the last 22 years combined,” Browning said.

Fain called the deal “a turning point in the class war that has been raging in this country for the past 40 years.”

The Ford and Stellantis pacts, which would run until April 30, 2028, include 25 per cent in general wage increases for top assembly plant workers, with 11 per cent coming once the deal is ratified.

The Ford agreement revives cost-of-living adjustments that the UAW agreed to suspend in 2009 during the Great Recession.

At Stellantis, workers get cost-of-living pay that would bring raises to a compounded 33 per cent, with top assembly plant workers making more than $42 per hour. Top-scale workers there now earn about $31 per hour.

The GM agreement also grants 25 per cent in base wage increases through April 2028, and will cumulatively raise the top wage by 33 per cent compounded with estimated cost-of-living adjustments to over $42 an hour.

Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan, said the Stellantis deal showed that the car companies “feel they are at the mercy of the UAW, that the UAW is not going to give any mercy.”

Bruce Baumhower, president of the local union at a large Stellantis Jeep factory in Toledo, Ohio, that had been on strike since September, said he expected workers to vote to approve the deal because of pay raises, including the immediate 11-per-cent raise on ratification. “It’s a historic agreement as far as I’m concerned.”

The UAW began targeted strikes against all three automakers on Sept. 15 after its contracts with the companies expired. At the peak, about 46,000 UAW workers were on strike — about one-third of the union’s 146,000 members at all three companies.

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