The American auto union UAW announced a tentative agreement with Stellantis to end the strike at the automaker on Saturday, three days after a similar agreement with Ford.
The agreement, reached after 44 days of a strike that simultaneously targeted Detroit’s three major automakers (the third was General Motors), calls for a 25% increase in base wages by 2028, the union said.
It includes several adjustments, including cost of living adjustments that allow for a 33% salary increase, or $42 per hour.
Like the agreement with Ford, any tentative agreement with the Italian-French-American group Stellantis must be ratified by a vote of UAW members.
“Stellantis workers will return to work during the agreement ratification process,” the UAW said in a statement.
The wage increase under the tentative agreement is slightly less than the 40 percent that Shawn Fain, the union’s powerful leader, demanded when the UAW began the strike on September 15. However, it is, for example, significantly higher than the value of 9% originally proposed by Ford in August.
US President Joe Biden welcomed the agreement.
“I commend the UAW and Stellantis for reaching a historic agreement after hard-fought, good-faith negotiations that guarantees workers the wages, benefits, dignity and respect they deserve,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.
“Once again we have achieved what seemed impossible just a few weeks ago,” said the president of the UAWM, assessing that “we have begun to reverse the trend in the war against the American working class.”
Fain said Stellantis would create about 5,000 jobs over the life of the deal, a reversal from the job cuts the automaker had considered before negotiations.
Following the agreement in principle with Ford on October 25, the UAW announced that the American manufacturer’s employees would return to work to put pressure on General Motors (GM) and Stellantis.
This is the first time that the Big Three have been the target of an attack at the same time. The latter, combined with the development of the next collective bargaining agreement, mobilized a total of almost 45,000 of the 146,000 workers enrolled in the UAW before the agreement at Ford.
General Motors is now the last major American manufacturer not to reach an agreement with the auto union. The Arlington, Texas, plant is the latest to be affected by the strike movement, while the company reported quarterly results that exceeded expectations.