UAW members ratify deal with GM

Across the UAW, members voted 55% in favor of the agreement, according to the union’s online vote tracker.

Locally, support for the deal was mixed.

At GM’s components plant in Lockport, members of UAW Local 686 voted 90% in favor of the deal on Wednesday. At GM’s engine plant in the Town of Tonawanda, members of UAW Local 774 voted 57% against the agreement on Monday.

The contrasting results reflect the differences in the makeup of the two plants’ workforces, and what they gained through the new contract, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.

As part of GM’s components holdings division, the workers at the Lockport plant will see much bigger gains on a percentage basis in their hourly pay over the life of the contract, Wheaton said.

“They were a lower tier. They were not paid the full legacy [GM] workers’ pay rates.” The Tonawanda plant has more of those “legacy” workers, whose pay increases will not be as dramatic over the life of the contract.

GM’s Lockport plant has the larger hourly workforce of the two sites, with about 1,400 members at that plant represented by the UAW compared to 753 at the Tonawanda site. The UAW went on strike at targeted Detroit Three plants over a six-week period before reaching tentative deals; workers at the local plants were never called by the union to walk out.

The UAW represents about 46,000 workers at GM plants around the country. As the results from individual UAW locals came in each day, the contract’s fate was unclear until near the end. Some veteran workers who voted against the deal wanted bigger pension increases.

Wheaton said he views the deal’s margin of victory as a credit to UAW president Shawn Fain’s ability “to get every dollar…