Possible UAW Agreement

It doesn't appear set in stone yet, but UAW president Ron Gettelfinger has announced that the union has reached a tentative agreement with the automakers as part of bailout negotiations that GM and Chrysler are currently dealing with.  According to the Washington Post, with some nice quotes from Charlie Craver (George Washington):

The plans are expected to accelerate wage reductions, job cuts and loss of benefits, changes already spurred by foreign competition, declining sales and the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. . . .

While declining to detail the concessions, Gettelfinger said the union is in discussions with the automakers over their Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Associations, the funds to which the companies have contributed hundreds of billions of dollars to pay retirees' health-care costs. Some auto analysts suggested that the companies would need to eliminate or substantially reduce retiree benefits to stay afloat.

Analysts also said the developments are being closely watched by other unions and that the automakers' plans could play a role in undoing gains won over time in the labor movement. The UAW "was the most successful industrial union in the country," said Charles Craver, a labor employment law professor at George Washington University. But "right now employers are vehemently anti-union," Craver said. "They will use this as an opportunity to tell workers, 'This is what happens when you get a union.' " . . .

Craver . . . said the only way for automakers to cut retirees' health costs might be to file for bankruptcy. Negotiating with the retirees might be difficult because they are not union members. "The UAW doesn't represent them," Craver said. If GM and Chrysler can't get "the retirees to agree to it, they will have to go to bankruptcy . . . to substantially alter the pension and health care."

For more background on the 2007 VEBA agreement, see here, here, here, and here.  Although some in the labor movement weren't happy with the VEBA plan, they're no doubt far less happy to see it go in this manner.

-JH