(WBEN) - Shortly following an agreed upon deal between Stellantis and Ford, it was reported earlier this Monday morning that the striking United Auto Workers (UAW) have reached a tentative deal with General Motors.
"It is no surprise at all that they got a deal," says Art Wheaton, Director of Labor Studies at Cornell University. "I think General Motors was a little disappointed the UAW was not available yesterday as they were trying to update their members on the Ford contract. So it was possible it could have been done yesterday. But the UAW was not actively negotiating as they were preparing for it and I'm assuming that the deal at GM will be very, very similar to what they got at Stellantis and Ford."
The UAW reached a tentative agreement last week with Ford and Stellantis on Saturday.
According to multiple reports, the worker's deals will last four years and eight months and include 25% general pay raises and cost of living adjustments. Combined they bring the wage increase to over 30% over the life of the contract.
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"What's important to know is that they've made tremendous progress on the temps and the newer hires, and some of them will be getting wage increases closer to 150% over the life of the contract," notes Wheaton. "So the 11% raise for the first year, that goes into your base wage, but you maybe changed your status so that if you were making much lower pay rates at like a General Motors components holding, you're going to immediately start seeing huge increases as they try to eliminate the lower tiers or the lower paid structures."
An interesting component to the now 6-week strike, it has been the first time in UAW history that the union has gone after all three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.
"They escalate when they're not making progress at the table to encourage the automakers to try to make better concessions or make better deals, and they were using what's called whipsawing, where they were trying to force GM to compete against Ford to compete against Stellantis, to see who could be the first to get a deal, because the first one to get a deal sets the pattern, and there are some advantages for being first because you can dictate some of the terms. So that's the strategy that companies have used for years trying to make one plant compete against another. This was the UAW forcing the three automakers to compete against each other, which was unique, or at least, not the typical way of doing it," Wheaton explains.
WBEN also asked Wheaton when he thinks temporarily laid off General Motors workers could go back to work, like the ones who were laid off at the Lockport plant in Niagara County.
"My guess is they could be back to work as soon as a week, or even sooner if possible, but it's going to take a while to restart things. And as far as I know, when they get a tentative agreement, they usually don't end the strike until it's ratified. But in this case, as soon as they made the first tentative agreement with Ford, they immediately called off all the strikes for Ford. So I would assume that they would get things up and running relatively quickly."