Ford and the UAW negotiated a contract over the weekend and the details are finally coming out and the hourly workers at Ford are getting screwed without the benefit of vaseline.
Retiree health care: Ford will be required to put up substantially less cash than GM or Chrysler to fund a voluntary employees' beneficiary association, or VEBA, that will take over responsibility for hourly retiree health care. Only 40 percent of Ford's contribution will be in the form of cash, compared with GM's 54 percent and Chrysler's 59 percent.
Which means by the time Mr Weenie retires we won't have health care because they money will have run out. This method of health care has not been proven out at all. So now we will need to start saving even more to be able to afford health care when we retire.
Factory investment: Ford will invest cash that would have gone into the VEBA in its plants to make them flexible, enabling them to produce more than one kind of model. Ford intends to make all of its North American plants flexible, except for those it expects to close as part of a previously announced restructuring plan.• Job security: Ford agreed to remove two plants -- Wayne Stamping and Assembly Plant and the Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake -- from its list of facilities targeted for closure and will not close any other U.S. assembly plants beyond those already slated to be shuttered. Ford also made specific new product commitments to Wayne and other facilities. GM set a moratorium on outsourcing, agreed to retain current product plans at 16 UAW assembly plants and made investment and future allocation commitments for 12 of those plants. Chrysler made no future product commitments but identified $15 billion in potential investment in U.S. plants during the term of the contract. The company announced $3 billion in powertrain investments in June.
So the money that should have gone to health care is being reinvested in plants that will no doubt be closed in a couple years.
Because somebody please explain to me how these plants were slated to close because they didn't have new vehicles to put in them but now all of a sudden they are remaining open. And what they didn't put in the above was that Ford still has the right to shuddered these plants at anytime. So I guess Ford is taking a page out of the Chrysler playbook and will announce they are closing the plants after the contract is signed.
Two-tier wages: Ford may hire new workers in assembly and other types of jobs at lower wages until the overall number of workers in the lower-wage tier reaches 20 percent of its UAW work force. GM and Chrysler may hire workers at lower wages but only for certain jobs not core to making vehicles.
So Ford has set the presedence for the next round of contracts because you know GM and Chrysler will be screaming their poor and just have to hire anybody at lower wages to save the company.
Jobs bank: Ford workers may not stay in the jobs bank, earnings nearly full wages, beyond one year. In that time, if they are offered another job at Ford, they must take it or leave the company. GM workers may turn down one offer but must take the second one. Chrysler workers without jobs may spend up to two years in the jobs bank. After that, the UAW and Chrysler would negotiate a plan for workers.
This is reasonable and everyone was actually expecting this.
There is no mention of bonuses like GM and Chrsyler got but I am sure they are in there but just not mentioned in the paper.
I have a feeling that this contract will not be passed by the UAW membership. Because once you give up a little, the company will keep pushing for more and more. Just ask Northwest employees, who have given up 50% of their wages and never got back what was promised to them all the while the executives got huge raises and bonuses for getting the employees to give up.
Chrysler did the Ford UAW members a big favor by screwing it's employees so quickly after the contract was signed because the UAW members are going to remember that and apply that to the plants that are now miracuously going to "stay" open.
Posted by Quality Weenie at November 5, 2007 08:33 AM | TrackBack