Uaw

DETROIT -- United Auto Workers members harbor widespread concern about a two-tier pay and benefits plan that they believe may come out of this year's contract negotiations with Detroit automakers. The plan essentially creates a situation in which new hires never catch up to the wages and benefits of current Detroit autoworkers. "We're worried about the second-tier people," said Daniel Gibson, 41, a Delphi Corp. worker from Athens, Ala., who is in Detroit this week for the 2007 UAW Special Convention.

DETROIT -- About 16,500 hourly workers -- nearly double the number expected -- have taken an early retirement offer from General Motors, company and union officials said yesterday.The program's wide acceptance gives a boost to the struggling automaker's efforts to trim its bloated work force. It also provides further evidence of a new cooperative spirit emerging between GM and the United Auto Workers union.The early retirement plan, announced in December after negotiations between GM and the UAW, provides retirement incentives to workers 50 and older who have been with GM at least 10 years.

DETROIT: UAW workers at Ford Motor Co. reluctantly ratified an agreement that reduces their benefits, break time and potentially weakens the fiscal soundness of a retiree health care fund in an effort to help the ailing automaker survive the global recession. The United Auto Workers said yesterday that 59 percent of production workers and 58 percent of skilled-trades workers voted in favor of the agreement during elections at locals nationwide. "Once again, UAW members have stepped up to make the difficult decisions necessary to deal with the reality of the current economy, the deteriorating auto industry as a whole and specifically the negative impact the economic climate is having on Ford Motor Co.," UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said.

DETROIT -- While their union membership shrank by 15 percent last year, United Auto Workers officials spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on meetings at splashy resorts from Palm Springs, Calif., to Cape Cod, Mass., and paid tens of thousands more for bowling and shooting tournaments, baseball and golf. More than $22,000 went for souvenir key chains. The spending is outlined in U.S. Labor Department forms that, for the first time, require unions to provide greater details about how they spend members' money.

DETROIT -- The United Auto Workers union in Dayton, Ohio, says it's frustrated by lack of progress at contract talks at two key parts plants and will ask union headquarters in Detroit to authorize a strike.UAW Local 696, which represents workers at GM's two Delphi Chassis Systems brake-parts plants in Dayton, crippled GM's North American car and truck production in March 1996 when it went on strike for 17 days.Union leaders circulated a newsletter Tuesday to workers at the plants, saying it would ask UAW Vice President Richard Shoemaker "to seriously consider" issuing a five-day strike notice to GM. A five-day letter warns the company that a strike deadline has been set."

DETROIT -- The United Auto Workers has selected General Motors Corp. to be the lead negotiating partner, also known as a strike target, in the national contract talks, leading workers, analysts and labor experts to believe the union has agreed - in principle - to establish the retiree health care trust that the nation's largest automaker so desperately wants. The union has agreed to indefinite contract extensions with Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC, those companies acknowledged. Either side can break off the extension with three days' notice, people familiar with the matter said.

They are intense. They both like to know even the smallest details. They also are sometimes hard to read. And they have both reached the peak of their careers just as their organizations are struggling to reverse deep, long-term losses. That is why the United Auto Workers union strike against General Motors Corp. is not only the clash of two giants of the American auto industry but of two men, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and G. Richard Wagoner Jr., GM's chief executive and chairman.

Some General Motors Corp. retirees, angry that they did not get a say, are asking the United Auto Workers union to reconsider its support for a plan that saves the automaker $1 billion a year in part by forcing retirees to pay out-of-pocket health care premiums for the first time. "They can't pull the lever for us," said Lorna Foster, 66, whose 68-year-old husband, Bob, sent a letter Dec. 12 asking the union to let retired workers vote on retiree concessions. "We're working our fool heads off trying to get them to turn this around.

Although the United Auto Workers scored some significant gains in its tentative three-year pact with Ford Motor Co., it remained a bit premature for workers at the local General Motors Corp. assembly plant to celebrate.Auto industry analysts offered conflicting assessments yesterday over whether the nation's largest automaker could afford to live with terms of the Ford agreement, which is expected to serve as the pattern for talks with GM and Chrysler Corp."GM can't afford it," said Arvid F. Jouppi, an analyst with Keane Securities Co., who has been following the auto industry since the early 1960s.

After months of tough talk, Delphi Corp. stood by its words yesterday, saying it would slash thousand of jobs, close or sell two-thirds of its U.S plants and ask a bankruptcy court judge for permission to throw out its union contracts. The judge has scheduled a hearing on the petition May 9 and no action is expected before then. The move by the nation's largest auto parts supplier raised the stakes in a five-month-old conflict that could have a far reaching impact on the company, its 33,000 workers, its unions and the U.S. auto industry.