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DETROIT -- With the deadline closing in on them, officials on both sides continued to predict yesterday that Ford Motor Co. and the United Automobile Workers union would sign a new labor contract by tonight, avoiding a strike.Even if they miss the deadline, which falls at 11:59 p.m. tonight, negotiators are likely to continue talking, officials said, since they have not reached an impasse.Such eleventh-hour bargaining is not unusual in automobile talks. If the two sides settled early, it would be harder for the company to convince its shareholders, and the union to convince its members, that they achieved, respectively, the leanest or the fattest deal possible.

Like their co-workers in Baltimore, union workers at General NTCMotors Corp. plants around the country voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new national contract, the United Auto Workers announced yesterday.The three-year contract, covering such issues as wages, job security and fringe benefits, was ratified by 85 percent of GM's hourly and skilled trades workers. It was the widest approval margin of a national contract in more than a dozen years.More than 90 percent of the workers at GM's van plant in Baltimore voted in favor of the agreement Sunday.

PEORIA, Ill. -- Striking members of the United Automobile Workers union held firm in the nation's most bitter labor dispute yesterday, largely defying an order by Caterpillar Inc. that they return to their jobs or risk being replaced by non-union workers.Caterpillar said about 300 of the 12,600 striking workers had crossed the picket lines, while union leaders insisted the number was far lower.The union, which has been on strike for five months, said that the low number demonstrated that its members were united in wanting Caterpillar, the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment, to match a labor agreement signed last year between the UAW and Deere & Co. But the union was far from jubilant about the day's events.

DETROIT - The United Auto Workers union is optimistic it can help General Motors Corp. reduce health care costs, as long as changes are made within the restrictions of its members' existing contracts, the UAW's president said yesterday. "We are willing to continue working with General Motors, within the framework of our national agreement, to reduce costs in health care and other areas," UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said in a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit yesterday. "We're optimistic we can find ways to do that."

Dale Brickner yesterday summed up the tentative agreement between Ford Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers this way: It is General Motors who will pay.Brickner, the associate director of Michigan State University's School of Labor and Industrial Relations, believes, like some other industry observers, that it will "be a pretty rough row for GM to hoe" if the terms of the contract are applied to General Motors Corp.Some say that unless the union gives ground on the key issue of requiring the automakers to maintain 95 percent of their current jobs over the life of the three-year pact, it could force GM into a strike situation.

DETROIT - If Delphi Corp.'s unionized workers go on strike, General Motors Corp.'s plants start slowing down in 48 hours and one of the automaker's biggest assets, its stockpile of cash, could rapidly dwindle, industry experts say. Industry observer David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., said GM plants, which use Delphi components on all of their vehicles, would be disrupted within two days of a strike by unions representing the nation's largest auto-parts supplier.

General Motors Corp.'s proposed labor contract appears to offer good news for its White Marsh transmission plant. The deal calls for production through at least 2012 at the three plants the facility supplies with transmissions, the United Auto Workers said yesterday. The plants are in Flint and Pontiac, Mich., and Arlington, Texas. "It's going to directly affect us on a positive side -- we're going to have longevity just like they do," said Fred Swanner, president of UAW Local 239, which represents nearly 370 White Marsh workers.

Members of the United Autoworkers at Martin Marietta Corp., including 550 workers at the Middle River aerospace plant, have overwhelmingly approved a three-year contract that will raise wages 4 percent this year and an additional 3 percent next year.The contract, which also provides two lump-sum payments, creates at Middle River a two-tier wage scale that will pay lower rates for certain jobs on some contracts.The pact, covering 5,800 Martin Marietta employees in three states, was approved by almost 90 percent of those voting over the weekend, the union said.

DETROIT - After three months of intense talks, General Motors Corp. and the UAW still appear no closer to an agreement that would lower GM's soaring employee health care costs, despite the automaker's insistence that a cost-cutting deal is a top priority to counter mounting losses. The UAW said yesterday that it had assembled a team of internal and external financial and legal analysts to examine GM's claims that it needs to tackle employee health care costs. Wall Street auto analysts, who earlier had hoped for a deal in June, now say it could be months before any kind of deal is reached - if at all. One Wall Street analyst said the fact the UAW has just hired outside advisers to study GM's finances sounds like what happens at the start of talks, not near the end. GM is pressing the UAW to either reopen the existing four-year contract two years into it, or help GM find ways within the contract to trim the $5.6 billion in cash that GM expects to spend on health care this year.

PEORIA, Ill. -- Caterpillar Inc. and United Auto Workers union representatives plan to resume full negotiations today with a federal mediator, as expectations grow for a multiyear contract proposal.Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Director John Calhoun Wells last met with both sides the week of Feb. 1, in sessions that included a 12-hour meeting. UAW members at the heavy machine and agriculture equipment maker are working under terms of a 1991 contract.John Stark, a Chicago-based heavy machinery industry analyst, said union members told him that both sides tentatively agreed to a six-year contract.