Signs of Discord as U.A.W. Locals Consider G.M. Deal

After a monthlong strike that has idled General Motors plants across the Midwest and South, union leaders are gathering on Thursday in Detroit to consider a deal that could send workers back to the assembly lines.

But even before the meeting started, there were signs of dissent from union members gathered outside the Renaissance Center office complex, where G.M. is headquartered and the contract negotiations took place. As the roughly 200 union officials who will vote on the proposed contract arrived for the meeting, they were greeted by about 30 workers from the Lordstown, Ohio, plant in red T-shirts shouting, “Vote no!”

G.M. shuttered the Lordstown plant earlier this year as it discontinued production of the Chevrolet Cruze. An electric-vehicle maker is supposed to take over the factory, and G.M. has proposed a joint venture to build a battery plant nearby that would hire union workers under a separate contract.

While the details of the tentative contract agreement have not been publicly announced, there is no indication that G.M.’s reactivation of the Lordstown plant was ever on the table.

When it announced the tentative accord on Wednesday, the United Automobile Workers said it had “achieved major wins.” The deal includes wage increases and a formula for allowing temporary workers to become full-time employees, according to people familiar with the agreement.

But details about some of the most contentious issues in the negotiations have yet to emerge, including any G.M. commitments to expand domestic factory capacity or shift production to the United States from Mexico, both union priorities.

The union local presidents and regional leaders who will vote on the tentative accord arrived Thursday with little information.

“I’ve not seen anything,” said Holli Murphy, president of Local 2209, which represents workers at a truck plant in Fort Wayne, Ind. She said she was not sure which way she would vote, adding, “I’m very anxious to see the details.”

A rejection of the proposed contract would be a rebuke for the U.A.W. president, Gary Jones, and his negotiating team.

“If the rank-and-file vote down an agreement their leaders send them, they also are voting down the leaders,” said Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan who follows the auto industry. “Workers may ask whether it was worth being out of work a month to get a deal that could be close to what they would have gotten with no strike and no loss of pay.”

People familiar with the agreement said that it included a signing bonus higher than the $8,000 each worker received in the last contract in 2015, and that it would make no change to the employee share of health care contributions. They said workers would also get 3 percent wage increases in two of the four years of the contract and 4 percent lump-sum payments in the other two.

The deal would provide a formula for temporary workers to become full-fledged employees, they said, but they did not elaborate. The use of temporary employees, who make up 7 percent of the G.M. work force, was reportedly a sticking point in the talks, along with possible modifications to a two-tier wage system that paid less to more recent hires.

If officials of the union’s G.M. locals accept the tentative agreement on Thursday, they could call an immediate end to the strike. They could also continue the walkout until the deal is ratified by a majority of the 49,000 U.A.W. members employed by G.M.

But ratification is not a foregone conclusion. The last time the U.A.W. negotiated a contract with G.M., approval was delayed for a month in part because the automaker’s skilled-trades workers rejected the terms.

And on Thursday, workers from the shuttered Lordstown plant drove three hours in vans to protest outside the meeting in Detroit.

“If we don’t have product in Lordstown, we want them to vote no on this contract,” said Anthony Naples, a father of five who worked for 25 years at the Lordstown plant.

“Now our jobs are going away,” he said. “They have to figure out a way to get product in the U.S.”

When a group of G.M. executives stepped off an elevator, the Lordstown workers spoke out more forcefully.

“Mexicans don’t buy your cars!” shouted Todd Piroch, who worked 23 years at Lordstown before he recently transferred to a plant in Bowling Green, Ky., an eight-hour drive from his wife and two high-school-age children.

G.M. should make vehicles where it sells them, Mr. Piroch added. “Whatever the wage is down there, it’s not enough to buy G.M. product. I buy G.M. product. If we lose Lordstown, it is really going to hurt that whole area.”

One of the union’s main objectives was getting G.M. to reopen the car factory in Lordstown, a goal that President Trump endorsed. G.M. closed that plant, and others in Baltimore and in Warren, Mich., as part of a cost-cutting effort that eliminated 2,800 factory jobs and thousands of white-collar positions.

Another sticking point was the automaker’s tiered wage structure: While workers who started with G.M. before 2007 earn about $31 an hour, most of those hired since then make much less, and so-called temporary workers are at the bottom of the scale at about $15 an hour.

Every day the strike continued, the economic ramifications spread throughout the auto supply chain, resulting in layoffs or pay cuts for tens of thousands of employees at factories that provide G.M. with parts.

In Mexico and Canada, G.M. plants that depend on American factories have been shut down, putting thousands out of work. In Flint, Mich., at least 1,200 truckers and production employees from suppliers were out of work because of the strike, including hundreds from Lear, a supplier of seats to G.M.

The strike also cost the union, its members and G.M. hundreds of millions of dollars in lost dues, wages and revenue. In the United States, 34 G.M. plants went dark, forcing striking workers to make do with a $250-a-week subsidy from the union.

If the General Motors contract is ratified, the U.A.W. will turn its focus to Ford Motor or Fiat Chrysler. Contracts with those manufacturers expired on Sept. 14, but workers continued reporting to assembly lines while the union negotiated with G.M.

G.M. has a smaller U.A.W. work force than its Detroit rivals. But the union took aim at G.M. as the automaker has earned solid profits — it made $35 billion in North America over the last three years — while closing plants in the United States.

The U.A.W. is likely to try to reach similar terms with Ford and Fiat Chrysler, a standard practice known as pattern bargaining.

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