More than 16,000 workers at 11 Chrysler LLC plants in Michigan could walk off the job Wednesday if the automaker fails to reach a contract agreement with the United Auto Workers.
The UAW set an 11 a.m. Wednesday deadline for the ink to dry on a new deal, Chrysler representatives confirmed Monday.
If a strike occurs, Chrysler could become the second of the Big Three U.S. automakers to see a strike in the last month. The Wednesday deadline falls two weeks to the day that the UAW called off a two-day strike of 74,000 union members against General Motors Corp.
John Beck, associate director of MSU’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations, said he isn’t ruling out an eventual strike against Chrysler and the third of the Detroit area-based Big Three, Ford Motor Co.
“We could potentially end up with a strike in all three, which would be unprecedented, but it could happen,” Beck said.
The UAW represents 49,000 Chrysler workers nationally, or about a third less than the number of GM workers. Despite a disparity in size, Beck said he expects the contract between the union and Chrysler to look much like the deal with GM.
The highlight of that deal was an establishment of a GM-financed trust that will pay for retiree health care known as a voluntary employees’ beneficiary association, or VEBA.
“If the UAW is going to be facing a call for concessions, and if you decide a VEBA is a good answer for GM, you very well may decide that a VEBA is the right idea for the rest of the auto industry,” Beck said.
The difference, Beck said, will be how much the UAW is willing to put into such a financial plan. At a $28.75 hourly rate per worker, Chrysler pays the highest labor costs of the Big Three, according to the company’s Web site.
Chrysler officials have said the company faces a $340 million setback compared to GM and Ford because of health care concessions the UAW reached with the two companies. If those costs left Chrysler’s hands, it would save the company more than 16 percent of its overall health care costs in 2006.
Beck said coming up with such a deal could set up a tense, back-and-forth situation between Chrysler and the union.
“It would be like if you bought everybody a round of drinks years ago and I passed on that,” he said. “Chrysler could say that the UAW did this for everyone else before, but the UAW can say that it’s a different day and that they’re not willing to talk about what didn’t happen years ago.”
The UAW could extend the Wednesday deadline as negotiations continue, according to The Associated Press.
A Chrysler spokesperson was reached and declined to be attributed for this story.
Calls to multiple UAW officials were not returned for this story.
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