GM-UAW Agreement

Union pitches GM deal to ranks

UAW pulls out all stops to get historic contract ratified quickly.

Sharon Terlep / The Detroit News

The United Auto Workers today will kick off a massive, meticulous effort to sell a landmark labor deal with General Motors Corp. to 73,000 rank-and-file members.

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, fresh off weeks of intense bargaining and a national strike that shut down the No. 1 U.S. automaker for two days, must convince members he was right to agree to significant concessions and a historic deal that shifts $50 billion in retiree health care obligations to the union.

Gettelfinger will start the pitch in earnest this morning, when local union presidents and chairpersons from across the country convene in Detroit for the first of several informational meetings on the tentative agreement with GM. A meeting of regional leaders is scheduled Saturday; union locals will roll out the deal to members in the days following. Ratification requires a majority vote.

The process typically has gone easily for the UAW, and a national contract has never been rejected by the membership. But the 2007 contract talks have already broken from history and much of conventional wisdom. While the contract is widely expected to pass, no one is declaring it a done deal.

"This contract was very difficult to do -- it is probably not something that will get 70 percent ratification this time," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. "The main focus of the union right now is getting this ratified."

Gettelfinger said he wants a speedy process, though the union hasn't officially set a date for the vote. Several local leaders Thursday said they expect it will be sometime next week.

Almost immediately after reaching an agreement with GM at 3:05 a.m. Wednesday, the union began mobilizing leaders to arrange informational meetings and begin summarizing one of the most complex deals in labor history into a clear and concise booklet that will soon be distributed to locals nationwide.

Gettelfinger already has started to pitch what he calls an "outstanding" deal, telling members and the public that GM was persuaded by the walkout to make significant future investments in its U.S. plants.

GM won't be heard from throughout the process as the automaker steps aside to let union leaders manage their members.

The deal includes aspects that, on their own, would be a hard sell: a two-tier wage structure that will allow GM to pay lower wages to certain workers; no cost-of-living adjustments; and an exceedingly complex deal that shifts retiree health care to the union through a massive company-financed, union-run trust fund.

Dissidents shoot down deal

Analysts and labor experts believe it's unlikely the deal will be rejected by a membership whose main worry is protecting jobs. But neither the union nor GM wants to take chances.

Throughout the process, the automaker went to painstaking lengths to avoid angering Gettelfinger and workers, staying silent throughout the strike and releasing only a short statement once the deal was reached.

Union dissidents are working to shoot the deal down with Web postings and e-mails disparaging Gettelfinger and the contract.

"GM execs laughed all the way to the bank," read one e-mail from the Soldiers of Solidarity dissident group.

But with the U.S. auto industry battered by competition from leaner foreign rivals, few believe the union will risk rejecting the contract and sending negotiators back to the bargaining table.

'This is a tough situation'

The last rank-and-file vote, in an off-contract year, showed a slimmer margin of victory than past votes.

In 2005, the UAW agreed to a landmark health care deal with GM -- and later Ford Motor Co. -- that increased what retirees pay for health care. Members voted yes on those deals, but by a far narrower margin than usual. The GM deal passed by about 60 percent, and just over half of Ford workers voted in favor.

Chrysler LLC, then owned by DaimlerChrysler AG, never got a deal to match GM and Ford.

The closest members came to rejecting a national agreement was in 1982, when GM and the UAW opened their contract nine months early and produced a settlement that included significant givebacks, said labor expert Harley Shaiken of the University of California-Berkeley. Reaction to the agreement from local leaders was so harsh the deal never saw a vote. The union instead bargained a similar deal with Ford and later returned to GM. The union, however, has proven adept at reading its membership, and if leaders felt they couldn't get the deal ratified, they wouldn't have agreed to it.

"Throughout the negotiations, the union is aware and the company is aware that, ultimately, members have to vote on this," Shaiken said. "The wild card is when workers get angry at the situation and vote against something because they're angry, but that doesn't seem to be the case here."

You can reach Sharon Terlep at (313) 223-4686.