
According to reports quoted by CNBC, the United Auto Workers and General Motors reached a tentative agreement on a new contract on Monday, marking the end of the strike.
The discovery was made a few days after Ford and Stellantis reached comparable agreements.
On Wednesday, the union struck a framework agreement with Ford, and on Saturday, it announced a contract with Stellantis, the company that manufactures Ram, Dodge, and Chrysler automobiles.
A simple majority of the union-represented employees of each carmaker must then ratify the agreements after they have been authorized by local UAW leaders. That will require multiple days to complete.
After their previous contract with the Big Three expired on September 15, almost 13,000 UAW members went on strike. Over time, that increased to roughly 40,000 of the 146,000 union members quitting their jobs. Each company’s output was hindered by that, with the consequences becoming more pronounced with time.
GM announced on Tuesday that the strike was costing it $200 million a week at the moment and would cut its yearly pretax earnings by $800 million.
The contracts have a four-and-a-half-year expiration date if members approve them. Union members will receive a pay raise of 11% initially and a further 25% during the term of the agreement. Along with other greatly improved benefits, the new deal also restores cost-of-living increases, allows workers to attain maximum salaries in three years as opposed to eight, and safeguards their ability to strike over plant closures.
In the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–2008, which compelled GM and Chrysler to seek government bailouts followed by corporate reorganization, UAW members decided to forgo cost-of-living increases.
UAW President Shawn Fain claimed that while the automakers were making record profits, their employees were struggling with lower pay for new hires, reduced benefits for retirees, and the consequences of the greatest inflation in 40 years. This became a major bone of contention in the present negotiations.
Fain used to say, “Record profits mean record contracts.”
For the first time, employees of all three corporations went on strike at the same time as UAW members. The union had previously forced a business to the negotiating table by going on strike, after which it forced the other two top automakers to accept comparable conditions.
It was also unorthodox to launch a modest attack first and build up to a larger one. Fain, who took over as head of the autoworkers’ union in March, attributed the group’s success to its “sit down strike” against General Motors over nine decades prior.
Another major point of contention was the shift from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. The union charged that the Big Three planned to shift jobs from unionized manufacturing factories to lower-wage establishments that produce batteries. Subsequently, the UAW announced that GM has consented to include workers from those electric battery operations in the new contract.
Employees at GM will resume work in light of the tentative agreement, just as those at Ford and Stellantis did upon the announcement of those agreements.