The Detroit News - Representatives of the United Auto Workers and Chrysler Group LLC are back at the bargaining table today after talking until about 2 a.m. this morning in an effort to hammer out an agreement on a new national contract before Monday morning.
That is when the leaders of locals representing some 26,000 Chrysler Group LLC employees are scheduled to meet at the union's Region 1 headquarters in Warren.
Local leaders are usually only summoned when an agreement has been reached, but the message faxed to union halls late Friday and early Saturday was ambiguous.
"The purpose of this leadership meeting is to update and discuss on negotiation status," said the summons, which was signed by UAW Vice President General Holiefield. There was no mention of an agreement.
A union source said UAW President Bob King was confident that a deal could be reached by Monday morning, but felt his members deserved an update either way.
Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne told reporters in Montreal on Friday that he expected negotiations to shift into high gear over the weekend, but called the agreements the UAW has already reached with General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. "overly generous."
King has been at the bargaining table in Auburn Hills since Wednesday — a day after concluding a tentative agreement on a new national contract with Ford.
"We are at Chrysler and in intense bargaining to try to reach an agreement," King said Friday.
The company confirmed its negotiators will remain at the table.
"High-level talks are continuing over the weekend," said Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson.
The UAW typically only summons local leaders to Detroit when a deal has been reached. King's decision to call them here now could be a sign that a tentative agreement on a new contract is imminent, or it could be designed to increase the pressure on Chrysler.
Negotiators from both the company and the union reached provisional agreements on most of the contract language weeks ago. But they have so far been unable to overcome their differences on health care cost-sharing, caps on entry-level workers and signing bonuses.
Chrysler is the smallest of Detroit's Big Three automakers, but it is proving the toughest nut for the UAW to crack in this year's contract negotiations. Despite their public pronouncements of mutual appreciation, relations between King and Marchionne remain strained after the UAW leader offended Marchionne by refusing to meet with him until he concluded an accord with GM.
Hanging over this weekend's talks is the threat of arbitration — a nuclear option King has vowed to avoid.
"I don't consider that an option at all," he told reporters Tuesday. "Sergio doesn't want to turn it over to a third party. I don't want to turn it over to a third party. We can craft out the best solutions together."
Marchionne said Friday that he, too, hopes to avoid arbitration. But a source close to the executive say he is not afraid to go there if necessary. Marchionne believes King has more to lose in arbitration than Chrysler.
Labor disputes between public sector employees and government agencies often end up in arbitration, but the practice is rare in the private sector. It has never been used to break a deadlock in contract negotiations between the UAW and a Detroit automaker. But Marchionne insisted the union agree to it as a condition of Fiat SpA's 2009 takeover of bankrupt Chrysler.
Arbitration is a risky gambit for both Chrysler and the UAW. The process could take months, and the outcome is uncertain. But the longer it takes to reach an agreement, the more money Chrysler saves because any new contract will likely increase the automaker's labor costs.
Until the two sides ink a new contract or resolve their differences through arbitration, Chrysler workers in the U.S. will continue to work under the existing agreement.
Chrysler also can make a compelling case for more favorable terms from the UAW than its crosstown rivals have already negotiated. While both GM and Ford are making money, the Auburn Hills automaker has not turned a profit since emerging from bankruptcy in 2009. Chrysler is gaining ground, but its share of the U.S. auto market is still substantially smaller.
Going on strike is not an option. The Obama administration forced the UAW to waive its right to call a national walkout until 2015 when it bailed out Chrysler in 2009.
But the union says it still has the right to strike over local issues. Members of UAW Local 1302, which represents workers at Chrysler's casting and transmission plants in Kokomo, Ind., took a strike authorization vote in August, and some observers have suggested King could call them out to pressure Marchionne.
But King said he does not believe a strike is a viable option, either. It would certainly scuttle whatever hope he has of convincing foreign automakers that the UAW has put the confrontational tactics of the past behind it. And convincing at least one of those companies to recognize the union has been at the top of King's list of priorities since he became president of the UAW in 2010.
"Bob King is coming into this with a vision and sense of urgency. He wants to see this work," said labor expert Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "He's not interested in drawing lines in the sand. He wants to see Chrysler succeed."
