UAW And Fiat Chrysler Reach Deal, Avert Strike

Fiat Chrysler has avoided an expensive strike at its USA plants after reaching a tentative agreement in eleventh-hour bargaining with the United Auto Workers. However, 65% of membership voted against the last tentative agreement reached between FCA and the UAW last week.

If workers had walked off the job, a short strike would have inflicted minimal financial pain on workers and have little impact on the company whose dealers have robust stocks of most best-selling models, with a couple exceptions. But members are seeking an end to the current two-tier pay structure, more specific guarantees of new vehicles for USA factories and a return of cost-of-living pay raises.

But workers said it did not narrow the gap sufficiently or fast enough. “If they give them more money, we won’t have no problems”.

A letter to Fiat Chrysler that was posted on the UAW website says the union is terminating its contract with FCA at 11:59 p.m. September 7. The UAW agreed to the two tiers of pay when then-Chrysler was near bankruptcy in 2007.

The contract language becomes a tentative agreement if the council votes to approve it as such, the news release says.

A UAW spokesman declined to comment beyond what the letter said. The local represents workers at three transmission plants in Kokomo and one in nearby Tipton, Ind.

Finally, the rank and file may have been surprised to see photos of Williams and Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne sharing a friendly hug at the beginning of contract talks.

“We have plenty of inventory”, said Bill Fox, a Fiat Chrysler dealer and chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association.

The UAW could have moved on to complete contract talks with either General Motors or Ford but decided instead to attempt to restructure the agreement. “That’s the biggest obstacle out there”.

Management at Fiat Chrysler said that the two-tier wage system is not something that can continue forever, but that it can’t afford to eliminate it faster.

Jeff Beallas, a veteran employee at the Toledo Machining Plant noted that it has been 12 years since he and other top-tier workers have had a raise.

The tentative agreement must be ratified by vote of Fiat Chrysler’s workers in the United States.

The agreement “addresses our members’ principal concerns about their jobs and their futures”, UAW President Dennis Williams said in a statement. But to make that happen, the union has to accomplish what it couldn’t back in 2007: forcing the older workers who enjoyed the long-lost golden age of American auto manufacturing to make sacrifices for the new reality.