UAW and Big Three Talks Underway, Negotiations Will Last Until Fall

06/13/96

The united Auto Workers have begun negotiating their three year contract with the big three Detroit carmakers, and talks will most likely last until after Labor Day. The current bargaining agreement expires at midnight on September 15.

Early indications are that this year's talks will be long and tense, although both sides have toned down their rhetoric substantially in the last couple of weeks to emphasize the mutual benefits of finding common ground.

With 750,000 active members across the country, the UAW is one of the biggest labor organizations in the U.S. At the bargaining table the union represents the interests of millions of employees.

The big issues this year will almost surely focus around job security for workers (from the union's perspective) and efficiency and productivity (from the car maker's angle). Both sides aired their differences surrounding these issues during the UAW strike against GM's Delphi brake assembly plants in Dayton, Ohio earlier this year.

That 17 day strike, which cost GM $900 million in lost profits, was triggered by GM's increasing use of "outsourcing" to cut their costs. Outsourcing is a practice whereby manufacturers farm out work that can be done in-house to outside non-union and often overseas suppliers that pay their workers less. Outsourcing, the union says, may enlarge investors' and manufacturers' already fat bank accounts (carmakers are currently pulling in unprecedented profits), but it can cost workers their jobs.

GM and the UAW were able to work out their differences in Dayton, after the automaker agreed to add jobs at the striking brake plants. Since then, however, GM announced that they would close five other Delphi component plants, signaling the company's intention to keep the pressure up on the outsourcing issue.

Each of the three carmakers bargains a separate contract with the union, although negotiations are expected to remain fairly steady amongst all of them until after labor day. At that point the union is expected to target one carmaker and concentrate their efforts on signing a contract with it. The other two contracts will then be shaped around the first one signed. Although the possibility of strikes against the targeted automaker runs high, automakers like to be the first company that signs an agreement with the union, because the contract is generally more tailored to their particular situation if they do.

Paul Dever -- The Auto Channel