DETROIT (Reuters) – The United Auto Workers union said its tentative contract deal with General Motors includes plans for investments around electric vehicles and will raise wages for thousands of U.S. hourly workers at units with lower wage tiers than at vehicle assembly operations.
The UAW released more details of its tentative 4-1/2 year deal with GM The main economic provisions of the agreement follow the pattern set at Ford and Chrysler parent Stellantis, providing 25% base wage increases for full-time workers, which could total as much as 33% including newly negotiated cost-of-living allowances. Temporary workers will have a faster path to full-time status and could see wages rise by about 50% immediately. Temporary workers who convert to full-time status could more than double their hourly pay over the life of the agreement, the UAW said. The GM agreement will move more than 7,000 UAW workers in GM component plants, service parts warehouses and what GM calls “subsystems” operations up to the higher wage levels paid to assembly plant workers. The new contract would largely unwind a strategy the automaker has used for years to hold down labor costs, UAW officials have said. “We won this round,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a video address on Saturday. Now that preliminary approvals for all three contracts are done, UAW leaders will spend the next two weeks working to win “yes” votes from rank-and-file union members at the Detroit Three.
(Reporting by Joe White and Ben Klayman in Detroit and Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
