The Canadian Auto Workers union told Reuters on Thursday it was waiting to hear from General Motors on a proposal that could resolve plant-specific issues, clearing the way for a tentative contract deal.
The union had hoped for quick agreements with GM and Fiat SpA’s Chrysler after reaching a tentative contract agreement with Ford Motor Co on Monday, but progress has been slow.
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CAW National Secretary-Treasurer Peter Kennedy told the news agency he expected to hear from GM on a union proposal on local issues sometime Thursday morning. GM’s response will give the union a sense of whether the two sides are likely to reach a tentative contract deal on Thursday, he said. “If this is positive, then there’s a good chance we could get it done,” he said.
Contract talks between the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and General Motors had been “bogged down” on Wednesday on plant-specific issues, a CAW official earlier told Reuters, making a quick breakthrough on an overall deal unlikely.
Two days after the union and Ford reached a tentative contract agreement, separate CAW talks with Fiat’s Chrysler Group were less advanced than the GM negotiations and the two sides remained far apart, the news agency said.
“Right now things have kind of bogged down on some local issues,” CAW national secretary-treasurer Peter Kennedy said of the GM discussions. The local issues concern job security and work standards, he said.
“We have been in meetings back and forth on that, trying to clarify those and get those issues behind us, so we can focus on the economics of the deal,” he said in an interview.
Reuters noted that the slower pace of talks followed optimism on Tuesday that a GM deal might not be far off. CAW national president Ken Lewenza had said on Tuesday that the union had had a “very constructive” discussion with the leaders of the GM negotiating team and that the two sides had discussed the Ford framework agreement in detail.
Once the workplace issues are resolved with GM, the two sides can sit down and “clean up the agreements around the pattern”, Kennedy said.
By late Wednesday afternoon, the CAW had still not received a written proposal from Chrysler in response to the Ford framework deal, Kennedy said. He added that the union was not preparing to call a strike against Chrysler yet.
The CAW has said it would keep negotiating with GM and Chrysler as long as progress seemed to be in sight. If talks become deadlocked, however, the union was still threatening to call its first Canadian auto strike since 1996.
