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.

The Detroit News reports:

General Motors Co. rank-and-file approved the automaker’s proposed four-year contract with the United Auto Workers by a 2-to-1 majority, the union said Wednesday.

In the final tally, 65 percent of production workers and 63 percent of skilled trade workers voted in favor of the deal, ratifying a tentative agreement struck two weeks ago by GM and UAW bargainers. The new contract becomes effective immediately.

“The UAW and GM entered into this set of bargaining as America struggles with record levels of unemployment and an economy that shows little sign of improvement,” said UAW President Bob King in a statement released Wednesday morning.
In all, 48,500 workers from 81 locals got a chance to vote on the contract, which along with providing new jobs and more work for UAW members, boosts the entry-level pay by about $3 an hour, offers $75,000 buyouts for skilled trade workers, and includes a $5,000 signing bonus — to be paid out Oct. 14. Workers also will get a $1,000 “inflation protection” lump sum for the next three years of the agreement.

Negotiations continue on a new contract with Chrysler and Ford.

General Motors Co. will give its hourly workers a $5,000 signing bonus, if they approve a tentative contract agreement reached by the company and the United Auto Workers union Friday night, people familiar with the pact said Saturday.

Under the agreement, GM also has agreed to reopen its Spring Hill, Tenn. plant; base profit-sharing checks on North American profits, rather than on U.S. earnings; and give entry-level workers a $2-$3 an hour increase. Those so-called tier two employees, who are paid $14-$16 an hour, will be boosted to $16-$19 an hour.

Also, a person briefed on the deal said Saturday, the proposed contract includes buyout offers to GM’s skilled trade workers. The Detroit automaker has about 1,000 skilled tradesmen working on the line, rather than in skilled trades positions that it no longer needs. GM hopes to pare back the number of skilled trades workers on assembly lines. The tentative pact still must be approved by a vote of the union’s rank and file.

Ford and Chrysler are also in active negotiations with the auto worker’s union.

In a statement prior to CEO Sergio Marchionne hosting a visit from U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner later today, Chrysler said it plans to repay its government loans with a new term loan facility and newly issued debt securities that will be sold to institutional investors in a private offering.

The private debt offering is exempt from registration under the U.S. Securities Act and allows Chrysler to forego filing a formal prospectus publicly or seek SEC approval.

Chrysler will also use some of the $1.27 billion that it will receive from partner Fiat SpA to purchase an additional 16 percent stake in Chrysler to pay the loans in full as well as any related fees and expenses.

The Treasury Department has already received a sizable percentage of its loans to General Motors back as well, mostly through the sale of stock used as collateral when the company went public again late last year.

Under the agreement, which also involved 14 states and one tribal government, the company agreed to set aside $773 million to clean up the sites. According to the White House, the agreement will “give local communities the opportunity to participate in designing the strategy for repurposing these properties in accordance with their specific development objectives, using these funds to both properly clean them up and quickly return them to productive use creating jobs and restoring communities.”

Last week, claims had dropped to their lowest level in nearly two years. But the Labor Department says last week’s drop was a blip, noting that weekly jobless claims tend to be a jumpy measure. Big manufacturers like General Motors made fewer temporary layoffs than usual, due to higher demand and the already reduced size of their workforce.

“This action will give our auto companies some long-overdue clarity, stability and predictability,” Obama said Tuesday in a speech at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

The new rules unify the Environmental Protection Agency’s goals to reduce the emissions from automobiles and the Department of Transportation’s rules on fuel economy. The proposed program will cover model years 2012 through 2016, increasing fleet-wide fuel economy by 5 percent per year. This means by 2016, the fleet-wide average would hit 35.5 miles per gallon, and would need to meet a new limit on emissions per gallon. The new rules will need to go through the traditional approval process before they are finalized, which needs to happen by March 2010. But the administration estimates that they will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 950 million metric tons.

More importantly, it will be the Obama administration’s first action toward meeting its stated goals of reducing emissions and complying with the Supreme Court’s directive to the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The real question is whether the administration will follow through with its threat to move onto setting limits for stationary sources of carbon dioxide emissions, like power plants, refineries, and manufacturers. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson declined to offer much information about their progress on that front at a press conference on Tuesday.

“EPA will continue to do it’s job, which is to respond to the now 2-plus-year old ruling about the Clean Air Act,” said Jackson. “I think it is fair to say that today’ announcement is path-breaking … It is the beginning of regulation. We should expect the EPA to continue to do its job.”

But she also made it clear that the administration would still prefer not to write the regulations. “I hope that doesn’t come to pass,” she said. “I believe that legislation is the preferable route.”

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“It’s a pretty simple proposal,” Alexander told MSNBC Wednesday. “And if you think about it, it’s pretty logical. I mean, the government used the taxpayers’ money to buy General Motors, 60 percent of it, so we might as well get that stock out of Washington, and back in the hands of 150 million individual investors.”

Nevermind, for just a moment, that the proposal has nothing whatsoever to do with either the FDA or Joe Camel. The fascination here is that lawmakers remain infatuated with the concept that the Wall Street bailout, used to scoop up GM, was funded by taxpayers.

Do you know how you know that it wasn’t? Because not one taxpayer dollar was allocated to cover the $700 billion tab. Instead, Washington borrowed the cash, largely by selling T-bills to foreign nations like China and Japan.

When lawmakers choose to raise taxes to balance budgets, then they can make claims that taxpayers are owed the goods and services at the other end of the spending. Otherwise, GM would be best considered Ginseng Motors.

The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bail-out is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise. Yet if this is the goal, surely there are better ways to allocate $60bn than to buy GM? The funds would be better spent helping the Midwest diversify away from cars. Cash could be used to retrain car workers, giving them extended unemployment insurance as they retrain.

But US politicians dare not talk openly about industrial adjustment because the public does not want to hear about it. A strong constituency wants to preserve jobs and communities as they are, regardless of the public cost. Another equally powerful group wants to let markets work their will, regardless of the short-term social costs. Polls show most Americans are against bailing out GM, but if their own jobs were at stake I am sure they would have a different view.

So the Obama administration is, in effect, paying $60bn to buy off both constituencies. It is telling the first group that jobs and communities dependent on GM will be better preserved because of the bail-out, and the second that taxpayers and creditors will be rewarded by it. But it is not telling anyone the complete truth: GM will disappear, eventually. The bail-out is designed to give the economy time to reduce the social costs of the blow.

Beyond GM, an even bigger worry should be the continuing long loss of well-paying, middle-class jobs that once allowed significant numbers of Americans to share in the country’s prosperity, Reich said. The government bailout of GM, he wrote, will do little to address that problem — in fact, it will only worsen as the automaker cuts jobs to stay afloat for as long as possible. In this new economy, GM’s old adage has been turned upside down, according to Reich. What’s bad for GM these days is what’s bad for America as well.