Not this time. The UAW is barred from striking GM and Chrysler and hasn't walked out at Ford in decades.

With smiles and handshakes for the cameras, negotiators for the United Auto Workers Union and Chrysler Corp. will today begin the challenging task of coming up with a new contract for more than 20,000 hourly U.S. autoworkers. Later this week, the situation will repeat itself at both Ford and General Motors.

The scene may be familiar – occurring every three to four years for the last three-quarters of a century – but seldom has so much been riding on the outcome.  Still struggling to emerge from the domestic auto industry’s worst downturn since the Great Depression, the viability of Detroit’s Big Three is a lot less certain than recent profits might suggest.  But the UAW itself has to worry about the future.

Consider Chrysler where there are now about 23,000 UAW-represented workers – a decline of nearly 50,000 in less than a decade.  A recent filing with the federal government revealed total membership dropped to 376,612 at the end of 2010 – including union-represented jobs in non-automotive industries.  The UAW’s ranks peaked in 1979, when it counted 1.53 million dues-paying members.

“The current situation is not sustainable,” warns Harley Shaiken, a long-time student of the UAW and a professor at the University of California – Berkley.

So, both sides know that their fates may ride on what happens between now and mid-September, when talks are scheduled to wrap up.  The question is whether these negotiations can produce settlements that keep Detroit competitive while also satisfying the workers who will eventually have to approve the agreements.  What we may see, many observers are betting, will be contracts that contain expanded profit-sharing packages that more closely link workers’ remuneration to the health of the automakers than ever before.

What’s clear, said a well-placed source briefed on the negotiations at Chrysler, is that “We’re out of the game of leading (the industry’s) labor costs.”

As insiders from both union and management acknowledge, the discussions are more transparent than ever before.  While this week might mark the ceremonial beginning of negotiations, “We’re now talking all the time,” stressed the Chrysler insider.  The UAW, in particular, is well aware of the financial realities of not just the Big Three but also of the so-called “transplants.”

The foreign-owned manufacturing facilities, such as the Honda plant in East Liberty, Ohio, the Kia assembly line in West Point, Georgia, and Volkswagen’s new factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, are the silent partners at the bargaining table.  They now produce millions of vehicles annually and provide the competitive base that Detroit makers insist they have to match in terms of quality, productivity and, of course, labor costs.

During the last round of contract talks, in 2007 – and then during the 2009 industry meltdown, when GM and Chrysler plunged into bankruptcy — the UAW was pressed to cut the price tag on its wage and benefits packages by nearly a third.  While the figures vary slightly from company to company, Detroit makers were paying around $76 an hour, all in, in 2006.  Today, that’s down to somewhere in the low to mid-$50 range.

And new “hires” are getting just half that figure under a controversial two-tier structure that was reluctantly approved by Ron Gettelfinger, the former UAW president.  His successor, Bob King, has complained that new workers are not getting a “living wage,” and has suggested he will press for at least a phased-in increase.  But King is also aware that there are some significant benefits from the two-tier approach.

General Motors has been able to use the lower costs it authorized to justify building the new Chevrolet Sonic small car at a plant in Orion Township, Michigan.  The previous model, the Chevy Aveo, was assembled in Korea.  Chrysler, meanwhile, reportedly is studying more than 300 different options to begin in-sourcing various work, such as producing instrument panels and other components, that had been outsourced to lower-cost suppliers, over the years.

If this year’s contract talks were to follow the normal pattern, the UAW would simultaneously negotiate with each of the makers until sometime around the end of August.  Then it would shift emphasis to the company most likely to give it the contract it wants.  Once that “strike target” were to settle negotiations would move on to the remaining makers using the first contract as a pattern.

That’s less likely to happen this year, industry officials acknowledge, and for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, the UAW will legally only be able to strike Ford.  The terms of the 2009 bailouts at Chrysler and GM bar both strikes and company-ordered lockouts.  Should the two sides fail to reach agreement the issue will be turned over to binding arbitration.

While it’s true the union could legally strike Ford, few expect that to happen – indeed, there hasn’t been a walkout at the second-largest of the domestic makers since Gerald Ford was in the White House.  But despite the traditionally cordial relations between the UAW and Ford there are some deep tensions.

Indeed, Ford workers rejected a request to match the deep bankruptcy-led concessions given GM and Chrysler.  The maker claims it is now paying $58 all-in, which it contends is about $8 more than the major transplants – Toyota, Nissan and Honda.  So, expect to see the press for additional concessions, Mark Fields, President of Ford of the Americas, earlier this month insisting, “We have to be competitive.”

Ford did offer a carrot to workers, however, in the form of a hefty, $5,000 profit-sharing bonus – which was actually more than the company was required to provide based on its $6.6 billion in profits last year.  GM, meanwhile, came up with a $4,400 bonus.

If the automakers get their way, they will lay out a fixed dollar figure that would keep them competitive with the transplants and then work with the UAW to parcel that out in terms of wages and benefits.

For UAW President King, if fixed costs aren’t going to be raised, however, “Our members deserve more of the upside” when times are good, which will likely lead the union to press for enhanced profit-sharing formulas.

That would not just put money in the pocket for union members but it would also give the UAW bragging rights, something it desperately needs once it gets the Big Three contracts completed and moves on to its next big target.

Ever since the first transplants began to open in the mid-1980s the UAW has struggled to win bargaining rights.  But, so far, it has failed miserably.  The only plants it organized were set up as joint ventures between U.S. and Japanese makers.  Now, however, the GM/Toyota plant near San Francisco, known as NUMMI, has closed.  And the fate of the Ford/Mazda joint venture, in suburban Detroit, is uncertain, as Mazda is expected to pull out within the next couple years.

King has set organizing the other transplants as the UAW’s top priority and has even threatened to launch a global boycott should the foreign manufacturers resist, accusing them of human rights violations.  But, in the end, says labor professor Shaiken, “The UAW will have to convince workers at those plants that they need to be represented.”

In decades past, transplant management often defused organizing efforts by claiming the UAW’s historic antagonism would lead to strikes and job losses.  Today, King is likely to emphasize what he calls “creative problem solving,” rather than the saber rattling of his predecessors.  But he needs to show transplant workers that they’ll get more than just a union card for their monthly dues.

So the results of the contract talks beginning this week will likely have an impact far beyond the confines of Detroit – with both the Big Three and the UAW well aware that their futures are more indelibly linked than ever before.