Union leaders at Ford's Oakville, Ontario, plant are already saying that the pattern agreement with GM and FCA will get voted down at the facility.
With contracts with General Motors and Fiat Chrysler complete, Unifor, the union that represents Canadian auto workers, now turns its focus to negotiations with Ford Motor Co.
The union has set a deadline of Oct. 31, and tension about the two-tier wage system that was left basically intact in the in the new four-year contracts with GM and FCA.
Unifor President Jerry Dias has said that securing investment for the two Windsor engine plants will be the key to the talks. The Windsor engine plant, which employs 1,400, needs a longer term commitment of new product to stay open, says Chris Taylor, Local 200 president, who chairs the union’s Ford master bargaining committee.
“The key priority is product for Windsor; we are in desperate need of product,” Taylor told the Windsor Star, noting that in 2014, Ford chose Mexico over Windsor for a new engine program.
“We’re not going to leave bargaining this year with anything less than a product committed to this site,” he said.
(Ford slashes production levels again. For more, Click Here.)
However, Unifor’s bargaining team is also under pressure from the 4,000 workers at the Ford assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario, where the two-tier wage scale is a significant issue. The plant has more than 2,000 workers who are on the second, or lower, tier, who have to accumulate 10 years of seniority before they qualify for the company’s top wage.
Officers from the Unifor Local 707 at the Oakville have stated the GM pattern agreement is unlikely to survive a vote in Oakville. Dave Thomas, president of Local 707, informed both Ford and Unifor national leadership that his members will vote down a tentative deal similar to the GM agreement.
(Click Here for more about Unifor’s ratification of the deal with FCA.)
When asked whether winning over the Oakville members would prove to be tougher than extracting a product commitment from Ford, Taylor said reaching a tentative deal would be the bigger challenge.
The Unifor contracts with GM and FCA includes financial gains for both veteran workers and new hires. Veteran workers receive a four-per cent wage increase over the life of the agreement — the first general wage hike in nine years — and $12,000 in lump sum and signing bonuses.
(Canadian auto workers authorize strike for talks with Detroit’s Big Three. Click Here for the details.)
New hires also receive the bonuses as well as wage hikes in each year of a 10-year pay grid toward the maximum hourly rate of $35.78. Under the previous contract, new hires remained at the starting hourly rate of about $20.42 for the first three years.