LITTLE ROCK — Chrysler LLC's contract with the United Auto Workers, gaining worker support, will be tested at the company's biggest manufacturing centers in the next two days.
About a third of Chrysler's UAW members are scheduled to vote in Kokomo, Ind., today and in suburban Detroit on Wednesday. Leaders at two of the plants have been vocal opponents.
The vote tightened Sunday,as two sites with 4,600 employees voted more than three-toone in favor, while one plant with 2,200 workers rejected it by a smaller margin. The New York Times on Monday said its own count, confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the results, showed 53 percent of voting workers to date have approved.
"The vote reflects how tough and troubling the overall situation is to the auto workers," said Harley Shaiken, a labor-relations professor at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley. "We won't know until the last local votes."
Four of six locals that have turned down the deal represent workers at auto-assembly plants, according to union officials and news reports. At least nine locals have approved. Ratification requires a majority of voting members, not the locals themselves.
Rejection of the contract likely would delay UAW negotiations with Ford Motor Co., next on the union's list. Workers of the other major U.S. automaker,General Motors Corp., recently approved a contract that was ratified by two-thirds of voting union members.
Locals snubbing the Chrysler contract so far represent about 11,160 workers, according to a Bloomberg News tally; those approving have about 9,210. Chrysler has 45,000 UAW workers; the number of eligible voters who are casting ballots isn't clear.
The union finishes voting on the four-year deal this week. Workers at Local 51, representing two engine plants in Detroit, voted Monday, but results weren't available.
Late Sunday, Local 624 workers at New Process Gear in DeWitt, N.Y., approved the contract, The Associated Press reported. About 87 percent of 2,300 eligible workers voted in favor, AP said.
Workers at a Jeep assembly plant in Detroit on Sunday became the latest auto-factory employees to turn down the contract, according to the Detroit News. The plant has 2,200 UAW members.
Auto-assembly workers are spurning the contract because UAW President Ron Gettelfinger wasn't able to secure work for Chrysler plants as far into the future as he did for General Motors factories last month, said Bill Parker, chief of the UAW committee that negotiated the Chrysler contract and an opponent of the deal.
The Jeep plant is one of the few that has been promised a new program to replace current models.
Roger Kerson, a UAW spokesman, declined to comment on the outcome of the votes.
"If they resolved that issue alone, it would go a long way to satisfying not only the general membership, but also local leadership," Parker said in an interview.
Parker's home plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., is one of four suburban Detroit factories with a total of 9,300 workers voting Wednesday. He has said he would campaign against ratification.
Likewise, union negotiator Shawn Fain for the transmissioncase plant in Kokomo, had posted a letter on Local 1166's Web site warning members that the contract isn't in their best interest. About 6,000 workers at four Kokomo plants are scheduled to vote tomorrow.
Fain said that the nine-member UAW negotiating team he was part of rejected it before Gettelfinger persuaded them to approve it on Oct. 10 and end a six-hour strike.
Dissatisfaction is increasing inside the UAW because its new contract contains concessions the union has resisted for decades, said Dan Luria, an analyst at the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center in Plymouth.
Information for this article was provided by Bill Koenig of Bloomberg News.
Business, Pages 23, 24 on 10/23/2007