The UAW announces a tentative agreement with Ford after 41 days on strike, calling for a 25% pay increase in what is being described as the union’s richest contract in decades.
Ford hourly employees will begin returning to work as soon as today while the agreement goes through the ratification process, with the UAW National Ford Council convening in Detroit to review the deal, according to the union.
“We are pleased to have reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract with the UAW covering our U.S. operations,” Ford says in a statement released after the union announced Wednesday evening it had reached a temporary agreement with the automaker.
“We are focused on restarting Kentucky Truck Plant, Michigan Assembly Plant and Chicago Assembly Plant, calling 20,000 Ford employees back to work and shipping our full lineup to our customers again,” Ford says.
UAW officials say union members will begin returning to work as soon as practical to put additional pressure on General Motors and Stellantis, where thousands of workers remain off the job as part of the UAW’s “Stand-Up” strikes, which began Sept. 15 at all three automakers.
Appearing live on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, after the tentative agreement was reached, UAW President Shawn Fain indicates the UAW will start the ratification process Sunday and union members could begin voting on the proposed contract next week.
The union’s decision to expand the targeted strikes with walkouts at Stellantis’s Sterling Heights, MI, Assembly Plant (pictured, below) and at the big GM assembly plant in Arlington, TX, helped focus the attention of Ford’s bargaining team, which had been stung by the walkout earlier this month at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant near Louisville, KY, according to Fain.
“Ford knew what was coming for them Wednesday, if we didn’t get a deal,” says Fain. After the strikes at GM and Stellantis this week, word began circulating that Ford pickup truck plants in Dearborn, MI, and Kansas City, MO, could be the union’s next target for the Stand-Up strikes, which have kept Detroit automakers off-balance.
Cornell University labor expert Art Wheaton says Fain has already “exceeded my expectations. It seems the strikes were necessary to force (the automakers) to make better offers.”
Fain adopted a highly confrontational attitude during the negotiations, at one point going on Facebook to hold up a copy of a Ford proposal and tossing it in a wastebasket.
“We won things nobody thought possible,” Fain says. “Since the strike began, Ford put 50% more on the table than when we walked out. This agreement sets us on a new path to make things right at Ford, at the Big Three and across the auto industry. Together, we are turning the tide for the working class in this country.”
UAW Vice President Chuck Browning, head of the union’s Ford Department, notes on the X video that the financial improvements in the tentative agreement are valued at more than four times the gains from the 2019 contract, which was negotiated after a 40-day strike limited to GM.
The tentative agreement also provides more in base wage increases than Ford workers have received in the past 22 years, says Browning. The agreement includes an 11% wage increase in the first year and base wage increases totaling 25% through April 2028. It will cumulatively raise the top wage over 30% to more than $40 an hour and raise the starting wage 68% to over $28 an hour.
The lowest-paid workers at Ford will see a raise of more than 150% over the life of the agreement, with some workers receiving an immediate 85% increase immediately upon ratification. The agreement reportedly includes a $5,000 ratification bonus.
The deal reinstates major benefits lost during the Great Recession, including cost-of-living allowances and a three-year wage progression, and eliminates divisive wage tiers that paid newer hires at a lower rate.
The UAW, however, appears to have modified its demand for a 32-hour workweek, accepting instead a new Juneteenth holiday and extra vacation days. It also backed off its demand for the reinstatement of a defined-benefit pension plan for workers hired after 2007. Instead, it improves retirement for current retirees, those workers with pensions and those who have 401(k) plans, which will be a relief to the financial analysts who follow the company.
“Our union has united in a way we haven’t seen in years,” says Browning.
“From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, our members came together to tell the Big Three with one voice that record profits mean a record contract,” he adds. “Thanks to the power of our members on the picket line and the threat of more strikes to come, we have won the most lucrative agreement per member since Walter Reuther was president.”
The strike at Ford, the first of any magnitude at the company by the UAW since 1976, featured an intervention by Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr., who chastised the union’s leadership for obstinacy that did nothing but help non-union competitors such as Toyota and Tesla.
The UAW, however, is finding public support in its fight for better wages.
Back in 1965, the Economic Policy Institute detailed last month, chief executives at America’s major corporations took home 21 times as much as typical workers. CEOs last year averaged 344 times a typical worker’s pay.
Some 67% of Americans now approve of unions, pollsters at Gallup reported in August, a figure approaching the record 75% favorability rating unions enjoyed in the mid-1950s.
