Details of the deal

Details of the hard fought deal are starting to leak out. First, the NYT's story this morning:

The contract’s main feature — a health care trust called a voluntary employee benefit association, or VEBA — means that G.M. will no longer have to carry the debt it will owe for employee and retiree health care benefits on its books. Earlier this year, G.M.’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, referred to those obligations as “very large and frankly formidable.”

That debt is estimated at $55 billion for the next 80 years. So G.M. will establish the trust with about 70 percent of that amount, making an upfront payment of cash, stock and other assets. The difference is expected to come from gains on investments by the trust.

In return, the union won guarantees that medical benefits for hourly workers and retirees and their families will remain in place for the next two years. G.M. will also invest money in its American plants, and will maintain its current union work force of 73,000, according to Ron Gettelfinger, the U.A.W. president.

And the Free Press has these details:

• Workers will receive no wage increases, but will each receive a $3,000 signing bonus, plus annual lump-sum bonuses of 3% or 4% for the final three years of the contract. The UAW also agreed to divert a portion of future wage increases to pay for health care for both active and retired workers, those sources said.

• GM will make more than 4,000 temporary workers permanent employees, a move that stands to increase UAW membership.

• The automaker will implement a two-tier wage and benefits scale for jobs that GM and the UAW have agreed are "non-core" production jobs. Those jobs are expected to include many positions in which workers do not have their hands on a vehicle in the assembly process. In addition, GM is expected to offer a targeted special attrition program to move workers in those non-core jobs off the active worker member rolls. Wages and benefits for second-tier workers will average $27 per hour, compared with the average $73 per hour of current workers, the sources said.

• Gettelfinger said the agreement includes modifications to the controversial jobs bank, which provides unemployed workers with full pay as they wait for job openings. The modification includes an expansion of the area in which workers would be required to move for a different assignment or lose their income. Currently, workers are not required to move for jobs farther than 50 miles from their previous plants.

There is mixed emotions about the deal, especially that two-tier structure. It's something a lot of people weren't talking about as negotiations got more and more intense, but now that it's become a reality, it's kind of splash of cold water.

"I hate it," Jason Craig, a 34-year-old Chrysler worker, bluntly said Wednesday after hearing about the UAW deal with GM.

Craig works at a Chrysler parts warehouse in Center Line. For two nights he had stopped and walked the picket line with GM strikers at a powertrain plant in Warren.

"These guys that walked off that line at 11 o'clock" Monday morning, Craig said, "I tip my hat to them."

At least one part of the deal has him upset. He fears the two-tier wage system in the tentative deal with GM could be carried over to Chrysler and affect his job. Hourly employees not directly related to making cars and trucks could receive lower pay and benefits under the contract.

Even if his job is not directly affected, Craig, a New Baltimore resident, said he would not approve a contract that creates two tiers of wages and benefits.

He backs his union and Gettelfinger, but this part of the deal undermines the union, he said.

"There's no solidarity in that," Craig said about the two-tier system. "If we have another strike and we have one guy making $15 an hour and another guy making $30 an hour, I guarantee you he's not going to walk out as fast as me."

But I think this quote encompasses what the union was fighting for:

Faust's father moved from Tennessee to Michigan in the late 1940s to work in a Chrysler Corp. foundry. The new contract gives the next generation a chance to keep things going, he said.

"We fight not just for ourselves, but we fight for the young people coming behind us," Faust said. "This is middle-class employment, and we want to keep it that way."