DETROIT — The eighth-longest strike ever for the United Automobile Workers union ended Thursday as workers at American Axle and Manufacturing approved a four-year contract that the U.A.W.’s president had described as subpar but “the best we can do.”þþUnder the deal, about 3,650 workers at auto parts plants in New York and Michigan, who had been on strike for 87 days, will earn an average of $10 an hour less. The workers can choose either to take a buyout of up to $140,000 and leave, or to stay and receive three annual “buydown” payments totaling as much as $105,000 aimed at helping them adjust to the lower wages. Those who are eligible will also be offered the possibility of early retirement which includes a $55,000 payment.For many, the decision was easy. “Give me my $140,000 and let me go,” said Walter Dowery, 36, who has been with the company since its founding in 1994.þþAll workers will receive an immediate bonus of $5,000, although that is less than half of what most lost while walking the picket lines since Feb. 26. Two forging plants, in Detroit and Tonawanda, N.Y., will close. Details about any buyouts will be given to workers after the factories reopen.þþ“It washes away three decades of what the U.A.W. has worked so hard for,” said David L. Gregory, a labor specialist at St. John’s University in New York. “We definitely have never seen a strike in the history of the U.A.W. that’s resulted in such a dramatic reduction in all of the tangible factors that they were fighting for.”þþMany workers who voted Thursday at U.A.W. Local 235 in Detroit summed up their opinion of the contract with a profanity or two, before acknowledging that they voted for it because they feared the alternative.þþ“The writing’s on the wall,” said Peter Grzadzinski, 57, a skilled tradesman who hoped to find another job so he could take a buyout and quit. “If we voted no, we wouldn’t get anything. They’d just close this place down.”þþ“This contract would not have passed 10 weeks ago or even a month ago, but after 12 weeks people are about to lose their house,” said Keith Bardol, 38, a machine operator who transferred last year to Detroit from a plant in Buffalo, N.Y., that American Axle was closing. “For a lot of the people here, it’s going to be a total lifestyle change. I wanted to vote no, but I’ve got to take into account my family.”þþAn end to the strike will come as a relief to General Motors, which had to stop or reduce production at as many as 32 factories that rely on a steady flow of parts from American Axle; 12 of those plants already resumed normal operations after securing those parts from another source. Most of the parts that G.M. buys from American Axle go on large trucks and sport utility vehicles that have been selling slowly, so the disruption had a minimal effect on sales.þþBut the U.A.W., in what analysts say was an effort to pull G.M. into the talks with American Axle, also called walkouts at G.M. assembly plants near Lansing, Mich., and Kansas City, Kan., that build two of the automaker’s most popular vehicles. The Lansing strike ended last week, a day before the U.A.W. reached a tentative deal with American Axle, and the strike in Kansas ended Thursday after workers there ratified a new local contract.þþThree days after the Kansas strike started, halting assembly of the hot-selling Chevrolet Malibu midsize sedan, G.M. said it would give American Axle $200 million to pay for buyouts and buydowns. G.M. increased its offer to $218 million in the hours before negotiators reached a tentative settlement.þþIn addition to that cash, the U.A.W. also got American Axle to loosen its demands for wage and benefit cuts. The company said it needed to cut wages in half, from $28 an hour to about $14 for many workers.þþThe U.A.W.-approved deal sets hourly wages at around $18.50, though some support workers at a facility in Three Rivers, Mich., will make as little as $10. Lou Majeske, 45, who works on American Axle’s Detroit gear and axle assembly line, said that rejecting the deal would have been foolish.þþ“With the economics of the times, he’s got us,” Mr. Majeske said of the company’s chief executive, Richard E. Dauch, whom U.A.W. members used to revere in better times for the industry. “We’ll stick our tails between our legs and hope for something better down the road. There’s a lot of people who would kill for what we’ll be making still.”þþ
Source: NY Times
