WENTZVILLE – Workers at the General Motors plant in Wentzville have rejected what union officials described as a record contract offer.
But nationally, the vote to approve the contract was still ahead by Wednesday evening.
Members of United Auto Workers Local 2250 in Wentzville were among several plants to reject the deal, with about 1,600 voting against the contract and 1,400 in favour.
“Some said, ‘It’s a great contract’ – just not exactly what they wanted to see,” said Katie Deatherage, president of Local 2250. “They think we can go back and get more.”
Although local unions hold separate, staggered elections, GM workers vote as a national unit to accept or reject contract offers. If approved nationally, the union-represented workers in Wentzville would work under the new contract.
Final results are expected as early as Thursday afternoon, when local results are officially due to the UAW. As of 6pm on Wednesday, the UAW vote tracker showed that workers nationwide had so far approved the contract, with 54% in favour and 46% against. But results from nine plants were still pending.
The strike was one of the boldest union campaigns in recent years, tying up tens of thousands of autoworkers for weeks, winning double-digit wage increases and at one point cutting hundreds of millions of dollars a week from GM’s revenues.
If ratified, the nearly five-year contracts would give GM workers across-the-board pay increases of at least 25%, plus cost-of-living increases.
Deatherage said she was not entirely surprised by the outcome of the Wentzville vote. Some workers expressed a desire to see the wage increase up front rather than spread out over the life of the contract, and pensions and retiree health care are perennial issues.
“Fortunately, they have the opportunity to use their voice and their vote, and they did,” she said.
Glenn Kage, political director and former president of UAW Local 2250, said he had “never seen a contract this lucrative” in his 40 years in the union. He said he publicly supported the deal and voted in favour of it.
Kage said he suspects that the Wentzville deal fell apart because workers’ expectations were so high going into the negotiations. Some hoped to achieve every one of the big, bold goals the UAW outlined at the start of negotiations – but negotiations don’t work that way, Kage said, and no contract is ever perfect.
The union adopted a new strategy in this round of negotiations with the Big Three automakers – GM, Ford and Stellantis. For decades, when collective agreements expired, the UAW would focus on talks with one company and use that agreement as a template for the others, a so-called “pattern bargaining” strategy.
This time the union went on strike at all three companies – but only at certain plants. The union called for more plants to join the strike over time, the cadence depending on the progress of negotiations.
UAW president Shawn Fain called the new format a “stand-up strike”, an homage to the “sit-down strikes” of 1936 and 1937, when auto workers sat down at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan, and refused to leave.
The UAW’s approach seemed designed to keep the companies guessing and thwart any efforts to stockpile parts or otherwise plan ahead. Fain didn’t announce the first plants to walk out until two hours before the strike began, and in the days leading up to the strike, workers and pundits alike were left guessing whether the UAW would target large, money-making plants like Wentzville or carry out a “bottleneck strike” by walking out at smaller plants that supply the larger ones.
Kage, who was president of the union’s Wentzville local during the 2019 strike, said he believes the new strategy will change the way the UAW handles contracts with the Big Three automakers in the future.
This year’s walkout drew unprecedented public support and attention, including visits to Michigan by President Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Wentzville workers held a rally with U.S. Reps. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
“We haven’t seen this kind of support in as long as I can remember,” Kage said. “Overwhelming public support, overwhelming political support. This was a big deal.”
About 4,100 people work at the GM assembly plant in Wentzville – one of the company’s largest U.S. operations – 3,700 of whom are represented by UAW Local 2250.
UAW Local 2250 in Wentzville was out longer than any other local in the widespread walkout by UAW members at GM, Ford and Stellantis. Workers walked off the job and onto the picket lines on the night of 14 September, when the contract expired, and did not leave until GM reached a tentative agreement on 30 October, days after similar agreements were reached with automakers Ford and Stellantis.
The plant resumed regular production shortly after the tentative agreement was reached, and most workers were back on the job within days.
Workers at Ford and Stellantis are also voting on the companies’ tentative agreements this week, and those votes were on track to pass by wider margins as of Wednesday evening.
As of 6pm, hourly workers at Stellantis were at 72% approval, with results from 11 plants pending, and hourly workers at Ford were at 66% approval, with results from 12 plants pending. If contracts fail at one or two companies but pass elsewhere, the UAW will face questions about how to return to the bargaining table on the rejected contracts.
During the 2019 strike, the GM contract was approved by 57% of members nationwide. In Wentzville, it passed by an even wider margin, with 64% of production workers and 70% of skilled trades workers voting in favour. This contract included a commitment to invest $1.5 billion in the recently completed plant to prepare it to build the next generation of GM mid-size pickup trucks.
