It is encouraging when so many others say unions are not relevant, that our UAW-FCA membership sees it differently.
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This is the second agreement FCA and the union have reached. Providing the Council approves, the UAW will release details of the Tentative Agreement to its membership and the ratification process will begin.
Another skeptic wrote: “If the bargaining committee was able to obtain “significant gains” this time around, the question is: why didn’t they get them with the first tentative agreement?” But now that the companies are making money, members want a bigger share.
Richard Bryce, a 66-year-old assembly line work at Fiat Chrysler’s Jeep factory in Detroit, said union officials are prepping workers for a strike, giving them detailed instructions on what to do if a walkout is called. If a new deal had not been reached by that deadline, the UAW could have called all of its workers to a strike, or just certain plants as part of a strategic strike. The union has since followed up with information about strike fund benefits, and local leaders have been given instructions on how to prepare, in an indication that the strike threat is serious.
A strike at FCA would have been the first in the US auto industry since a one-day stoppage at General Motors in 2007.
“The last time, you blinked and the strike was over”.
“(Fiat Chrysler) confirms that it has received strike notification from the UAW”, the automaker allowed in a statement Tuesday. Members objected to a two-tier pay structure that pays senior employees significantly more, and Fiat Chrysler’s failure to offer workers cost-of-living pay increases.
Norwood Jewell, the top UAW negotiator in the talks with FCA, had described the tentative agreement as the best contract the union had negotiated since 1999.
Shortly after midnight the United Auto Workers union posted a Facebook message indicating that a tentative agreement had been reached with FCA USA shortly before the strike deadline.
The company had said in earlier statements that the two-tier wage system can’t continue forever, but that it can’t afford to eliminate it immediately.
Under Chrysler and GM’s US government bailouts in 2009, the union was prohibited from striking the two companies during the 2011 round of labor talks.
Around 40,000 workers, mostly coming from the carmaker’s 23 factories in the Midwest, are members of the union.
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Two-tier wages were an easy compromise back in 2007, as everyone knew the UAW had to help lower costs for its struggling employers, and the strategy was to push the burden onto UAW members who didn’t exist yet.
