UAW offers concessions to automakers

December 3, 6:49 PMProgressive Politics ExaminerJay McDonough

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The United Auto Workers announced today their willingness to make contract concessions to assist the troubled Big Three automakers in winning loan guarantees from the federal government.  The UAW will agree to delay the autoworkers contribution to the retired workers insurance fund and suspend a program that paid benefits to laid off workers.

“This should be interpreted as a meaningful and a painful sacrifice,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor relations professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The jobs bank was “something the union worked over decades to achieve.”

....The concessions by the UAW, the industry’s biggest labor group, will save money as well as help the automakers argue that they have labor’s backing in shrinking operations to remain viable.

...The union will revise the payment schedule for UAW-run trust funds for retiree medical care that were part of a 2007 contract, President Ron Gettelfinger said today after an emergency leadership meeting in Detroit.

...He said an interest payment for the delay would be agreed upon by the companies and the UAW, which had 464,910 members at the end of last year for the lowest total since the Great Depression. The first contributions were due in January 2010, and the postponement would need approval by a federal judge.

....“We can’t have a union if we don’t have factories,” said General Holiefield, a UAW vice president who is the union’s liaison with Chrysler.  (Link)

The concessions will be something valuable for the automaker CEO's, scheduled to testify tomorrow before Congress, to keep in their back pocket.  With some promise that longer term union trouble may be resolved, some Congressional members who had previously expressed reservations about a bailout may now be more inclined to dole out the dough to Detroit. 

Or it sure can't hurt, anyway.