Fiat Chrysler labor contract appears to be headed for defeat

The workers in Toledo and Sterling Heights were among the last to vote in a nationwide ratification process that began last week.

Skilled tradesman John Kubicz, a millwright who works in the paint shop at the Jeep plant’s Cherokee factory, said he voted against the contract because as a 21-year Jeep plant worker who is close to retirement, “there weren’t a lot of positive things in the contract for the retirees”.

A UAW spokesman said the union wouldn’t disclose the vote count until after an assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill. completes voting this evening.

Williams has called 300 local union leaders to Detroit Thursday to discuss how to respond to the Chrysler contract’s rejection.

The proposed Fiat Chrysler pact would have narrowed the pay gap between top tier and lower tier workers to about $5 an hour, but not eliminated it. “I hope we don’t go that route”.

Detroit’s auto workers haven’t rejected a national contract in many years.

In Sterling Heights, 72 percent of production workers and 65 percent of skilled trades employees voted against the deal.

In another development, the UAW announced Tuesday that it might strike Ford’s Kansas City assembly plant, where popular F-150 pickups are built, over local issues such as safety and work schedules.

The tentative deal also includes a different wage scale for entry-level workers at the automaker’s Mopar parts and distribution centres. FCA might also need to adjust its plans for a manufacturing upheaval – or at least give a few sort of explicit commitment to preserving US factory jobs. At the UAW convention in March, Kathy Smith of Local 2015 spoke for many rank and file workers on two-tier pay and the degradation of once good UAW jobs at Chrysler. There’s non-union people in there, they’re making sub-standard wages. They could put Chrysler on the back burner and go someplace else for a while or they could revote this agreement.

Strikes are a very real possibility.

News of the company’s plans to move the Cherokee came after officials from Toledo and the State of Ohio spent more than a year putting together a land and incentive package to persuade the automaker to keep the Wrangler there.

A general strike of FCA could easily cost the carmaker $500 million a week in lost vehicle production, about half of the amount a weeklong strike would cost GM or Ford, said a source familiar with Detroit 3 production. “But I think a third option much more likely, and that is to start bargaining but change the lead organization to Ford or GM”.

Where does the UAW go from here?