Unifor vs. UAW: Which union won when it comes to the new contracts?

Through four months of tense contract talks, Unifor and the UAW took their own distinct paths to landmark deals with the Detroit 3. But as a rare round of overlapping auto bargaining wraps up in Canada and the U.S., did one union walk away with a superior agreement?

The answer, labor experts say, isn’t a simple yes or no, as the unions were bargaining on different timelines, in different currencies and from disparate starting points.

What’s indisputable, said Barry Eidlin, an associate professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal, is that Unifor and the UAW secured the best deals they’ve landed in recent memory.

“These are head and shoulders above anything that’s been negotiated in the auto sector since well before the ’08 recession,” he told Automotive News Canada.

Making a distinction between the Unifor and UAW agreements is like weighing the difference between a “really good contract and a life-changing contract,” Eidlin said. But ultimately, he would give the edge to gains made in the U.S.

As one key example, Eidlin pointed to advances for temporary workers at Ford Motor Co., General Motors and Stellantis plants in the U.S.

The UAW agreements with the three automakers will convert temporary workers into full-time staff after no more than nine months on the job. The move will put one-time temps into the standard wage-progression grid, lifting temp-worker pay by about 150 percent between current hourly rates and wages at the end of the UAW’s four-and-a-half-year deal.

Gains in Canada for the lowest-paid workers top out at about 75 percent of Unifor’s three-year agreements with the Detroit 3.

‘Deeper hole' for UAW

But the comparison on this point and many others isn’t direct because of the different bargaining paths the unions have taken since Unifor’s precursor, the Canadian Auto Workers, broke off from the UAW in 1985, Eidlin said.

“The UAW had dug itself a much deeper hole to climb out of than Unifor had,” he said. “They had both given concessions, but the UAW was on a whole different level and over a much longer period of time.”

Mathieu Dupuis, an associate professor of labor relations at Laval University in Quebec City, echoed the sentiment. Both unions made gains on the temp-worker front, but the use of temps at Unifor plants was far more limited to begin with, he said.

In Canada, temporary part-time workers — as opposed to temporary full time — are the sole class of temps, and starting wages are comparable with full-time, entry-level workers.

Unifor was starting from a better position in other aspects, too.

Unlike the UAW, Unifor did not need to fight to end tiers, Dupuis said, as the two-tier wage system was never introduced in Canada.

Taking in this historical context and carving in a few exceptions, the differences between the two sets of contracts are negligible, he said.

“It’s little details,” Dupuis said. “It’s not like one [union] said, ‘OK, we’re not bargaining for [cost-of-living allowances],’ and the other one had COLA.”

Dupuis, who is also a visiting scholar at the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations in New York state, said the three-year wage-progression grid secured in the U.S. is one clear mark in favor of the UAW deal, compared with the four-year grid locked in by Unifor.

Unifor leads on pensions

On the other hand, he pointed to pensions — an area that UAW President Shawn Fain acknowledged the union came up short on — as a category in which Unifor stayed ahead. Both unions made gains. But while UAW members will see improvements to their 401(k) plans — a type of defined-contribution pension — Unifor members in defined-contribution plans will be converted to defined-benefit plans at the start of 2025.

Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work and a former economist at Unifor, expects the Canadian union’s gains on the pension front to serve as a blueprint for unions in other industries that have faced similar pressure to walk away from defined-benefit pensions, which are generally considered superior for workers.

Defined benefits refers to how much retirement income employees get, while a defined-contribution plan specifies what the employer and employee contribute to an employee’s retirement account.

Both sets of contracts mark “historic” progress after years of belt-tightening, Stanford said, but the Unifor deal is “comparable to or superior to the UAW deal in most respects.”

General wage increases of 15 percent included in the Unifor deals compare with 25 percent in the UAW agreements. But when factoring in COLA payments and the longer term of the UAW deals, Unifor comes out marginally ahead, Stanford said.

Wage increases for Unifor members making the top rate — a majority of the workforce at Detroit 3 plants in Canada — total 23.6 percent over three years, including estimated COLA.

This compares with 33 percent for the UAW over four-and-a-half years. Annualized, the pay increases translate into 7.9 percent per year for Canadian workers vs. 7.3 percent for the UAW.

Stanford also pointed to the shorter contract term in Canada — which will get the union back to the bargaining table sooner, and EV transition supports that favor Unifor.

On one key intangible, though, there’s little question about which side came out ahead, Eidlin said.

“The big difference between the U.S. and Canadian contracts is much more at the symbolic level,” he said.

The six-week standup strike has had an “electrifying effect” in the U.S., Eidlin said, one that trumpets that the UAW is back at the forefront of the country’s labor movement.

While Unifor did a “great job winning a great contract,” its deals didn’t send the same transformative message, he said.

Eidlin expects the UAW to get a “huge momentum bump” in organizing further employers, while Unifor’s boost will be less pronounced.