More than 54 percent of 35,000 UAW workers at GM who cast ballots approved the contract, a union vote tracker showed. The UAW did not immediately offer comment. GM declined to comment until the union formally announces the results.
The contracts offers bigger wage increases than UAW workers have received in the past 22 years combined. Base wages for the highest-paid workers will grow by 25 percent over the 4½ year contract to more than $40 an hour. Cost-of-living adjustments will boost that wage further, to more than $42 an hour.
The contract also eliminates lower wage tiers that had left newer workers with worse pay, a move that will dramatically raise their pay. The lowest-paid temp workers hired this year at $16.67 will get a 158 percent raise to more than $42 an hour by the end of the contract, including cost-of-living adjustments, the union said.
That focus on lifting the lowest paid workers has been a common theme across new labor contracts signed this year, from UPS workers to Hollywood, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University.
“The labor movement in general had intense focus on trying to raise the lowest paid workers,” Wheaton said. “At UPS it was not about the drivers, it was about the people who load the trucks and move the boxes and work in the warehouse. At SAG-Aftra it wasn’t about getting Tom Cruise more money. It was about the 80 percent of the members who do not make $35,000 a year and therefore do not qualify for the SAG-Aftra health insurance benefit.”
With the new contracts “it’s overwhelmingly much more equal,” he said.
That larger benefit for the lowest paid was also what made the GM vote close. Five of GM’s largest plants voted the deal down in the past few days, with some veteran workers voicing opposition about receiving a lower raise relative to others.
Some workers said they were also disappointed that the union failed in its aim to reinstate defined-benefit pensions and retiree health care for all workers. But the contract does boost the company’s contributions to 401(k) accounts to equal 10 percent of a workers’ wages. It also offers more paid time off and gives workers the right to strike over any plant closure during the life of the contract — a right the UAW views as important to protecting jobs.
Marc Robinson, a former General Motors economist and strategist, said he was surprised that so many UAW members voted against “such a rich contract” but chalked it up to newly elected union president, Shawn Fain, publicly making very bold demands throughout the contract fight and setting high standards for what workers could win.
“[The union] probably got a better deal than usual because the companies weren’t used to Fain’s strategy, but it came with the risk of raising members’ expectations,” Robinson said. “The close vote reflects the extraordinarily high expectations.”
The contract comes after a long period of worker wages not keeping up with inflation, and after the union gave up some of its benefits around the time of the Great Recession, when the automakers were struggling to survive. The union managed to claw back many of those perks in the new deals, including restoring regular cost-of-living wage adjustments to offset inflation.
Another reason for the challenging vote among GM workers is that it’s possible that leaders of UAW locals might not have effectively sold the deal to union members, Robinson said. The division could reflect the fact that “there is no unanimity within the UAW,” he said, noting that Fain only narrowly unseated his predecessor in a runoff election seven months ago.
The deal also appears to offer UAW workers some protection in the industry’s conversion to electric vehicles. Workers have worried that wages and job security will be lower in the industry’s new battery and EV factories. The GM agreement includes language wrapping some of these new factories into the union’s main contracts with the automaker.
What exactly that will mean for battery wages is not yet clear, however.
The negotiations were at times extremely acrimonious, with the automakers balking at Fain’s brash style and big demands. Fain regularly railed against “corporate greed” and “the billionaire class” during Facebook Live addresses to his members, and called out the automaker CEOs for earning lucrative pay packages of more than $20 million a year.
The big contract gains are spilling over to benefit non-unionized autoworkers, too. Toyota, Honda and Hyundai have given their U.S. employees double-digit pay increases in recent days, in what analysts see as an attempt to prevent their factories from unionizing.
Fain has vowed to unionize as many automakers beyond the Big Three as possible, saying that this will be the UAW’s focus once the Big Three contracts are ratified.
