Members of the United Auto Workers rally outside the Stellantis Ram 1500 plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, after the United Auto Workers declared a strike on October 23, 2023.
Michael Weiland/CNBC
DETROIT – UAW members of Chrysler owners star According to preliminary results, the new labor contract was approved after a historically contentious round of negotiations between unions and companies. Published on Friday by the union.
This is the Detroit automaker’s second deal of the week.reach agreement General Motors Preliminary results show support from 54.7 percent of UAW-GM members who voted. UAW members Ford Ratification of their deal is also being accelerated, but a vote will go ahead on Friday.
Most Stellantis plants overwhelmingly approved the deal, which, like General Motors and Ford, includes at least a 25% wage increase. It also includes reopening a factory in Illinois that has been idled indefinitely.
according to UAW’s Vote Tracker, Of the more than 26,000 autoworkers who voted for Stellantis, 68.4% supported the deal. There are still some smaller facilities that need to finish voting, but those locations don’t have enough staff to offset the roughly 9,650-vote gap.
The Stellantis deal was met with fierce opposition at the automaker’s Jeep plant in Toledo, where 55% of workers opposed the deal. Other major assembly plants overwhelmingly support the agreement.
Both the UAW and Stellantis declined to comment on the results until they are finalized.
The contract ratification comes weeks after the automakers and unions reached a tentative agreement to end about six weeks of targeted strikes by the United Auto Workers.
The deals are record-breaking for unions, and negotiations have been far more confrontational and tactical than in recent history.
The union launched talks with all three automakers simultaneously, breaking with a recent pattern of negotiating with each automaker individually, choosing a lead company to focus its efforts on and modeling the remainder of the deal under a tentative agreement to lead.
If a deal is not reached by the Sept. 14 deadline, unions will launch targeted strikes on a plant-by-plant basis to catch the company off guard and ramp up pressure if needed.
At the height of the lockout, about 40% of the 146,000 UAW members covered by the agreement were on strike or laid off as a result of the lockout.
The new contract includes battery employees and other groups of workers not included in past deals. It’s unclear how UAW members will be covered by the new agreement.
For unions and UAW President Shawn Fain, these deals represent huge financial benefits; secure future jobs for union teams, such as battery plants; and serve as a springboard for organizing efforts at other non-union automakers operating in the U.S. — —This is Fain’s main goal moving forward.
The union said the deal’s improvements were worth more than four times the benefits of the 2019 contract and provided base pay increases greater than workers had received in the past 22 years.
For the company and its investors, these contracts represent an upper limit to forecast growth in labor costs. Although automakers have repeatedly criticized the union’s tactics, including six weeks of targeted strikes, they should be able to absorb the cost increases. That’s not to say they won’t seek to offset growth elsewhere with future investments, restructuring and other ways.
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