UAW declares victory as tentative agreement is met with Ford to end strike

The UAW has announced (and Ford has confirmed) that a tentative agreement has been reached with Ford to end the UAW strike that started six weeks ago. Ford workers will immediately return to work now that this tentative agreement has been met, though the strike will continue at affected GM and Stellantis facilities.

While UAW members are returning to work at Ford now, the members have not yet voted on the agreement. UAW leadership will take a few days to finalize and then publicize the specifics of the agreement, after which the union will get to vote.

Leadership says that returning to work right away, prior to the full approval vote by the membership, is an attempt to show a good-faith effort and continue pressure on GM and Stellantis, showing those two companies that the strike can end whenever they are willing to come to the table with an acceptable offer.

While all details of the deal have not yet been made public, UAW mentioned several of them in a short video announcement with UAW president Shawn Fain and vice president Chuck Browning.

UAW says that the total value of the raise achieved in this agreement is 4x as much as the value of raises earned in 2019 and is a larger raise than the union has achieved in the past 22 years combined.

The headline feature is a 25% pay raise across the board, though there will be even larger increases for some workers. UAW also earned the cost-of-living adjustments that had been a major sticking point of negotiations.

We can’t get into the specifics because many of them have not been released yet, but UAW is declaring a significant victory here on many points of what they had been asking for, some of which you can see in their slides here:

In previous negotiations, UAW has already made progress with GM, getting that company to agree to place all EV battery plants under the national master collective bargaining agreement. At the time that move was announced, Fain said GM had “leapfrogged” other automakers in the negotiations, though now it looks like Ford has offered the most, with enough to satisfy union leadership with the magnitude of the deal.