UAW strike day 10: Ford emerges from walkout's first week with a couple of wins

As the United Auto Workers strike against the Detroit Three automakers entered its 10th day Sunday, Unifor finalized a deal with Ford Motor Co. — one that experts say could set the pace for what to expect in the United States.

Members of Canada's autoworker union, ratified a three-year contract with Ford on Sunday, the first deal to be reached since contracts ended for both American and Canadian employees earlier this month.

The deal offers workers raises of more than 19% over the course of the contract, including the single largest negotiated general wage increase in Unifor history. It will help employees reach top-scale pay faster, add new investment in the Essex Engine plant in Windsor, and prevent Ford's three Windsor plants — Essex, Windsor Engine and Oakville Assembly, which stands to become the Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex — from closing over the life of the agreement.

And it is likely that will set the tone for negotiations on the American side of the border as well, experts say.

"I think it puts more pressue on the UAW around realistic deal points that automakers could accept," Daniel Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, told The Detroit News on Sunday. "When you look at the new Ford agreement, it's a rational agreement that makes mathematical sense. The UAW is trying to do mathematical gymnastics that just doesn't work out for GM, Ford and Stellantis."

Asked Sunday about the Unifor-Ford deal on a picket line at a Mopar parts distribution center in Center Line, some Stellantis workers said that elements of the agreement seemed like a win for autoworkers.

"I feel like, when Ford made a deal, it's setting a standard that we all will have to follow," said Bianca Garland, a team leader at Warren Truck Assembly Plant. "Those are wins."

She and other members of UAW Local 140, most wearing red T-shirts, formed a picket line outside of the Mopar plant to show support for their fellow UAW members who are on strike. The atmosphere was festive, with music playing and hot dogs cooking on the grill.

For Garland, the No. 1 issue in UAW contract talks is job security, as the company's ability to close plants concerns her, especially because Stellantis is domiciled overseas.

Another Local 140 member, Jacquelyn Cargile, who works as a material handler at Warren Truck, questioned why Unifor was able to strike a deal when the UAW's contract talks with the automakers are still going on. Negotiations continued over the weekend.

Cargile, wearing a red shirt that declared, "I don't want to strike but I will," said she feels like she and her fellow autoworkers have to beg for scraps from the automakers, even as inflation has raised the price of groceries and executives receive hefty paychecks.

"I feel like I'm begging you for a better way of living," she said of Stellantis executives. "You're telling me this is it for me? ... But you're eating good."

Meanwhile, Ives said he expected that negotiations with the UAW would get "nastier before it gets better," but that the Unifor deal sets "a sort of rough outline" for what comes next in the United States.

In the U.S., 41 plants remain on strike. Only one is a Ford plant, after UAW leaders say the company has made progress in talks, while the remaining plants are split between 19 General Motors facilities and 21 Stellantis sites.

Between that and the new Unifor deal, there is a feeling that Ford is so far the most successful of the automakers, said Marick Masters, professor of business at Wayne State University.

Having a deal with Unifor allows the company to "focus quickly on negotiations in the U.S. with the overall picture in North America over the next few years," Masters said. "It may give them more or less degrees of freedom, but it allows them to know with more certainty."

The end result? Ford has had the best week of the three automakers, Masters said.

"Being free of additional strikes is valuable," he said. "In addition, with Canada resolved, they can concentrate more on negotiation on the American side, where they've already made considerable progress."

He believes that all three companies still have gaps to fill before a deal can be reached, though. Masters expects the companies are going to have to come up even more on wages, and he's interested to see how far the union is going to go in its insistence on restoring retiree health care and pensions.

Regardless, he said, the first company to make a deal in the U.S. is likely to set the tone for the other two. The focus isn't changing much from company to company, even if each of the three is offering different deals. Bargaining with all three at once has created an interesting strategy.

"If Ford is making progress, I don't expect we'll hear a whole lot on that," Masters said. "But with regard to General Motors and Stellantis, if they're not more forthcoming in the very short-term, I would expect (the UAW is) going to ratchet up pressure sooner rather than later."

He expects an announcement from the union maybe as early as Tuesday to put more pressure on GM and Stellantis before additional walkouts could take place by the end of the week.

Michael Brandimarte, a UAW-represented worker at Ford's Michigan Assembly Plant, believes the UAW can and should hold out for a better deal than what Unifor struck with Ford.

"What we have presented to us on the table right now is already better than what they've ratified," he said. "If Canada's happy, fine. We want more. We want back everything we gave up. We want back everything indexed for the cost of living. We want to be able to live our lives as the gold standard of the working class that we once were."

Ford has put on the table the restoration of the cost-of-living adjustment formula autoworkers gave up more than a decade ago; a 20% wage increase over the life of the contract; the right to strike over plant closures; the elimination of a wage tier under which workers at components plants made less than those at assembly plants; guaranteed income security with health care for up to two years in the event of an indefinite layoff; an enhanced profit-sharing formula; and the immediate conversion of all temporary workers to full-time permanent status.

As the strikes continue, politicians around the country are getting involved. President Joe Biden is expected in Michigan on Tuesday, while former President Donald Trump will be in Clinton Township on Wednesday. In Missouri, at the striking Wentzville GM plant, Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, teamed up with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, for a solidarity rally Sunday afternoon.