The United Auto Workers has made it official: Its 41,000 members at Ford Motor Co. voted to accept the tentative agreement, the union announced Wednesday.

Results concluded Tuesday at the 58 UAW-Ford locals.

The final tally after two weeks is 63 percent in favor of the agreement with 22,031 “yes” votes to 37 percent voting against or 12,957 “no” votes, including 4,243 skilled trades voting in favor and 2,268 against. Total number of votes cast was 34,988.

The plan includes $16 billion in new investment intended to create 12,000 more jobs for autoworkers. UAW members have just begun voting on a proposed deal with Chrysler.

Hourly workers at Ford Motor Co. will receive a $6,000 signing bonus as part of a new four-year contract with the automaker that also pledges $4.8 billion in new investment in U.S. plants at least $15,700 in bonuses and profit sharing payouts.

The agreement also secures more than 12,000 jobs, including 7,000 previously announced – 6,250 hourly and 750 salaried – and 5,750 new jobs that will be added by the end of 2012 and pay an entry-level wage.

Included in the plans to create more jobs is more investment in Ford’s plant in Wayne, Michigan. Some of those jobs will be created by moving work done in other countries back to American plants. UAW members will vote on the contract soon.

Ford, which restructured without federal aid, now has 76,000 workers — more than it had in 2008.

Ford also has promised to add 7,000 workers in the next two years, hiring that starts late this year.

Chrysler added 4,300 jobs last year, ending 2010 about 600 shy of its 2008 employment level of 52,200. It also plans to hire 1,000 more.

At GM, U.S. employment stands at 77,000. Based on its forecasts, GM could employ up to 85,000 in the U.S. in the next two years — closer to the 92,000 it had in 2008.

The auto industry has added a total of 115,000 jobs since GM and Chrysler completed their restructurings as sales have consistently grown.

As the UAW prepares to head into labor talks this summer with the newly profitable Detroit automakers, several top union leaders say a showdown is brewing over this year’s contract — especially at Ford, which has made $9.3 billion over the past two years.

“If they don’t restore everything (we) gave up, the membership is going to knock it down,” said Bill Johnson, plant chairman for UAW Local 900, which represents workers at the Focus plant in Wayne. “The bonuses that were just announced are just ridiculous.”

The accumulated pay package for Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally, who is credited with rescuing Ford after arriving in 2006, is now valued at more than $300 million.

The current UAW contract with Ford expires in September and 1,200 delegates from the union are meeting this week in Detroit to plan their negotiating strategy for the new contract. The company is obviously going to want to keep labor costs as low as possible to help them compete with other carmakers.

Of the $1 billion allocated under the program, $775 million is out the door, catalyzing 184,304 transactions, the department reports.

Six of the top-selling vehicles are foreign, with the Toyota Corolla surpassing the Ford Focus at the top of the list new purchases. The others (in order of popularity) are:  Honda Civic, Toyota Prius, Toyota Camry, Hyundai Elantra, Ford Escape FWD, Dodge Caliber, Honda Fit and Chevrolet Cobalt.

The Transportation Department claims that the average fuel efficiency for the new purchases is 25.3 mpg, while the average mileage for the trade-ins is 15.8 mpg. But the administration is still refusing to release more detailed data surrounding individual transactions.

[W]hen the federal General Services Administration announced this week that it had spent $287 million in stimulus money to buy 17,205 new cars, it turned out that the biggest beneficiary was the Ford Motor Company, the only one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers that has not received a government bailout.

The General Services Administration, which manages a fleet of 213,000 vehicles for some 75 federal agencies, said it spent $129 million to buy 7,924 Fords; $105 million on 6,348 General Motors vehicles; and $53 million on 2,993 Chryslers.

Like buying Verizon stock, then grabbing an iPhone.

Yet the environmental goals of the program are quite modest. Although the White House press release on the subject claims that it will “prevent 26 million pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere,” it also states an “overall goal of at least a 10 percent increase in fuel-efficiency for the entire procurement.”

Studies have shown that 10 to 20 percent of a vehicle’s lifetime emissions come from its manufacture and disposal. If the government program results in the assembly of over 17,000 vehicles that are only 10 percent more efficient than those they are replacing, the overall effect is an increase in emissions.

The real impetus for this program, then, is to stimulate Detroit and help put the auto industry on a more eco-friendly path. The White House does not attempt to hide its aims; the press release states:

This accelerated GSA purchasing strategy is one component of the President’s overall commitment to supporting auto demand during this period of restructuring in the industry. Moving forward, the Administration will continue to work on several fronts to increase the flow of credit to auto consumers and dealers, and will work with Congress to pass an incentive program for people who turn in older, more fuel inefficient cars for cleaner cars.

Like a cash-for-clunkers program, this new fleet purchase is a small step toward a greener auto industry in the long term, even if its immediate effects are not as environmentally friendly as they appear.

As the auto industry decries the White House decision to reconsider California’s push for stricter emission standards, some environmental groups are quick to point out that several automakers have already pledged to meet the proposed guidelines.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Business strategies submitted to Congress, as part of a December bailout debate, by Ford and General Motors would, if achieved, make the companies compliant with California’s proposed emission reforms — the same changes the companies have opposed for years — according to an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Ford, for example, boasted that it would raise its fuel-economy standards 26 percent above 2005 levels by 2012, and 36 percent above the same baseline by 2015. General Motors, for its part, vowed fleet-wide fuel-efficiencies of 37.3 miles a gallon for cars, and 27.5 mpg for trucks, by 2012. (Chrysler, which did not include fuel-efficiency estimates in its report, was not a subject of the NRDC analysis.)

Both the Ford and GM plans — which surfaced during a December congressional debate over whether the Big Three should receive $34 billion in a taxpayer-funded bailout — set the companies on a pace that “easily” meets California’s proposed reforms, NRDC found.

Lawmakers had requested the strategies as proof that the companies could remain viable if they received the money. It wasn’t granted through Congress, but the Bush administration stepped in later with $17.4 billion in Wall Street bailout funding.

Supporters of tighter emission rules say the business plans are evidence that the automakers would be able to comply with California’s proposed changes, which call for a 30 percent reduction in vehicle emissions by 2016. In light of the sinking economy, they add, the move to more fuel-efficient vehicles might also help them sell more cars.

“They need to hold themselves up to a higher standard for their own survival,” said Roland Hwang, vehicles policy director at the NRDC and author of the analysis. “They can do it, and they’ve committed to it, in fact.”

Eli Hopson, Washington representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles program, conceded that the conversion between emissions and fuel efficiency is not a perfect science, particularly because California’s standards are derived differently than the national gauge. Still, he said, the NRDC report is good indication that California’s goals are achievable without overburdening the automakers.

“If [the companies] don’t reach the California standard,” Hopson said, referring to their viability reports, “they’ll be pretty close.”

The debate was renewed on Monday, when President Barack Obama — in yet another sharp break from his predecessor — announced that he’ll ask the Environmental Protection Agency to review California’s request to waive federal emission rules in favor of stricter state guidelines. State officials say the changes are necessary to rein in pollution and tackle global warming.

The Bush administration had denied California’s waiver in late 2007, arguing that it would create a confusing set of incongruous state standards that would prove harmful to automakers — a view Obama soundly rejected this week.

“This will help us create incentives to develop new energy that will make us less dependent on the oil that endangers our security, our economy and our planet,” Obama said. “Our goal is not to further burden an already struggling industry; it is to help America’s automakers prepare for the future.”

Many congressional Democrats, environmentalists and state officials agree. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) issued a statement calling Obama’s move “a historic win for clean air and for millions of Americans who want more fuel-efficient, environmentally-friendly cars.”

The California Air Resources Board estimates that tailpipe emissions pump more greenhouse gas into the air than any other source — representing 30 percent of the state’s carbon dioxide emissions. Adding to the urgency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report Monday indicating that it would take at least 1,000 years for the climatic effects of carbon emissions to reverse themselves, even if emissions were halted tomorrow.

Thirteen other states and the District of Columbia have adopted California’s more stringent emissions standards, while four additional states have taken steps to install those standards as well. Together, the states represent roughly 47 percent of the country’s vehicles, Hwang says.

But the waivers have sparked an outcry from the automakers, many Republicans and Michigan Democrats, who continue to argue that the new standards would put undue burdens on an already struggling industry.

GM spokesman Greg Martin dismissed the NRDC report Tuesday, claiming that “their numbers were off.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a statement Monday saying that approving the waiver will “destroy American jobs at the very time government leaders should be working together to protect and create them.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) echoed those sentiments, arguing that “a separate California standard will not only create the “confusing and patchwork set of standards” that President Obama today implied he wanted to avoid, but also, as the California standard is currently drafted, it is discriminatory against U.S.-made vehicles of the same efficiency as the imports.”

Still, Chrysler and General Motors have, combined, accepted more than $17 billion from taxpayers to keep them afloat through March. And Ford, which hasn’t accepted bailout funding, has said it may be forced to do so in 2010 if the economy doesn’t recover. Some observers say the bailouts leave the automakers little room to fight the emission reforms.

A series of toned-down statements from the industry Monday seem to indicate that the companies are well-aware that their powers of persuasion have been vastly diminished. GM, for example, said it “is working aggressively on the products and the advance technologies that match the nation’s and consumers’ priorities to save energy and reduce emissions.”

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents foreign and domestic automakers, said it “supports a nationwide program that bridges state and federal concerns and moves all stakeholders forward.”

“The bailout means that the auto companies work for us now,” said Daniel Becker, who heads the Safe Climate Campaign, an environmental group.

This United Auto Workers advertisement printed in The New York Times on December 3 was accompanied by text that described the auto industry crisis as a Main Street issue, not a Wall Street one. (uaw.org)

When the chief executives of the Big Three automakers first came to Washington to ask Congress for a $25 billion-bailout, they arrived in town on private jets.

When 16 active and retired members of the United Auto Workers headed to Washington on Sunday night to press the need for government help, they drove the 500-plus miles from Detroit in four American-made cars.

Dressed in baseball caps and UAW T-shirts and showing signs of fatigue after the nine-hour drive, the workers appeared at a press conference Monday morning on Capitol Hill to make their case for government assistance. The blue-collar image these members of the Auto Workers Caravan projected contrasted sharply with that of the well-heeled auto and Wall Street executives who had preceded them.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

It helped to underscore the difference between how they see the proposed bailout of the auto makers and that given Wall Street. Taxpayer money wouldn’t go to highly paid managers and executives, as it did on Wall Street. Instead, it would be a temporary loan to keep their industry afloat through the economic crisis and protect the jobs of rank-and-file American workers.

“The [auto] companies are asking for a fraction of the money that was given to Wall Street,” said Bill Alfred, president of UAW Local 35 and a member of the Auto Workers Caravan. “They’re only asking for a loan — not a free gift, not a free ride. They want to get this money to protect the industry and pay it back [to taxpayers]. … Those folks from Wall Street came and asked for money for free.”

UAW member Tony Browning emphasized that the money would be paid back to taxpayers once the companies get past the current economic downturn. “I work for the Chrysler corporation,” Browning said. “And we’ve been through this before, in 1979. … We got a loan in ’79, and we paid it back in record time, plus interest and everything. So that shows our credibility.”

During the debate over whether to bail out the car manufacturers or allow them to fall into bankruptcy, some lawmakers have blamed the UAW for the financial struggles of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. They say that workers’ overly generous wages and benefits have drained the companies’ resources and made it difficult for them to compete with manufacturers overseas. These union critics want concessions from the UAW as a precondition for any bailout.

Union leaders, not surprisingly, reject the notion that concessions are needed. “Talk of more givebacks by our union ignores the cuts we made just one year ago, when our union agreed to a 50 percent wage cut, down from $28 an hour to $14 an hour, and no pensions for new hires,” said Hammer. “Reducing our quality of life would have a ripple effect on our entire economy, and would just make things worse. The reality is that our labor constitutes just 8 percent of the price of a new car. We could work for free, and it wouldn’t solve the crisis.”

UAW local president Alfred rejected calls by some lawmakers for the ouster of GM CEO Rick Wagoner as part of any bailout. No such demands were made of the financial industry as a condition for receiving taxpayer money, he noted.

“General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are asking for $34 billion, and [some lawmakers] want to remove the executive of General Motors. So how many people do they want to remove from Citigroup for wanting, what is it, $400 billion? I’m thinking that’s a lot of floors they’re gonna have to clear in that building. So before they start calling for resignations, they’ve got to check what they’ve already done and correct that situation.”

It is not every day that the UAW defends the management of a Big Three company. Yet the automakers’ dire emergency has brought the leadership of the UAW and the companies to the same table at congressional hearings to plead for help. “At this point in time, we agree with the auto industry executives that yes, they need the bridge loan, that yes, they are truly in financial difficulty at this point in time, and therefore that the government needs to intervene,” said former UAW Local 235 president Wendy Thompson. “We agree on that question.”

But the auto workers made sure to hammer home their contrasts with the executives. “We didn’t fly here in our jets,” said Chrysler employee Browning. “We left them at home.”