UAW: Chrysler Has Until Tomorrow To Agree on New Contract

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DETROIT — If there was a script that automakers were supposed to follow for UAW contract talks, Chrysler seems to have overlooked it. As negotiations continued yesterday at Chrysler LLC’s Auburn Hills headquarters, the United Auto Workers set a deadline of tomorrow morning to agree on a new contract, or else workers could strike.

The deadline may be a tactic the union is using to squeeze some more concessions from the company. But it also may be that Chrysler isn’t just going to agree to the same terms that General Motors Corp. did last week just because that’s how it’s traditionally done.

Chrysler’s needs are different from GM’s requirements, analysts said, so a deal requires cost cuts in different places.

The union may have set the strike deadline for its 49,000 hourly workers because of how far Chrysler wants to push for cost cuts.

“We think that they may be holding out for something more than GM got,” an industry analyst for the consulting firm Global Insight, Aaron Bragman, said.

The UAW went on strike for nearly two days last month before coming to a tentative agreement with GM on September 26. Workers with the nation’s largest automaker are expected to wrap up voting on the agreement by tomorrow.

The union normally settles with one American automaker and then uses that deal as a pattern for an agreement with the other two. Among the differences this time, analysts say, are health care givebacks granted to GM and Ford Motor Co. in 2005 that Chrysler didn’t get, worth approximately $340 million a year.


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