Members who are employed at the Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake, Sheffield and Sheffield Lake voted 51 percent to 49 percent in favor of ratification, said Bill Samples, Local 2000 president.
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She said workers are right to believe “that if they can’t get their concessions back now, after five years of profits and at the top of the economic cycle, they’ll never get them back”. Officially, the UAW won’t say until all of the workers have voted.
“It’s clear that Ford increasingly sees OH as one of it’s main “go-to” places because the Ford workforce here knows what it’s doing and OH has worked hard to be a good partner”, Jim Lynch, a spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, said in an email Sunday about the proposed investment.
“It is one of the richest agreements in the history of UAW-Ford”, Mr. Settles said in a statement issued November 6, when the tentative contract was announced.
It included an ,500 signing bonus for union workers and $1.3 billion in new Ford investments in the two local facilities. Both groups of workers must approve the deal by a simple majority for it to be ratified.
“I like it. It’s the best we can get out of 12 years of having to get nothing”, said the 26-year union veteran outside of Local 600 in Dearborn. Those calculations don’t include profit sharing, which totaled more than $30,000 a worker during the past four years.
The company says that won’t have an impact for jobs – it’s more to free up space to make the Ford Escape.
As voting enters the final two days, the deal is failing among production workers – 52 percent “no” to 48 percent “yes” – and passing among skilled-trades employees by a slim margin of 51 percent to 49 percent, according to tallies compiled by Automotive News and a UAW local in Chicago.
All it takes to reject the deal is a majority of votes so union leadership is trying whatever they can to get the members yet to vote to support the deal and even held a news conference to get their message across.
“If the UAW represented a greater share of the US auto industry, it would help them gain greater leverage at the bargaining table, but those gains would still be tempered by the global automotive competitive reality”, Dziczek said.
Ford’s deal, which was completed after GM workers had finished voting, appears to have anticipated the objections raised by GM’s skilled tradespeople.
But, Dziczek said, “They’re probably not going to get them back, whatever happens”.
Ford was the third automaker to reach a tentative agreement with the UAW.
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The Fiat Chrysler contract set a pattern followed by GM and Ford, which essentially ends a two-tiered system that paid UAW members hired after 2007 less than those hired before that year. He said the workers have job titles, wages and experience that are unique to maintenance.
