The discussions on new contracts to cover the tens of thousands of active and retired workers at Ford, General Motors and Chrysler start Friday with Ford and Chrysler and Monday with GM. The current four-year pacts expire Sept. 14.

Despite making concessions on retiree health care benefits in interim pacts negotiated since the last agreements were signed, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger warned the firms they should not expect the union to roll over for more cuts.

"We\'re not going into negotiations in a concessionary mode, I\'ll tell you that," he said this week after a NAACP conference in Detroit.

That\'s even though the three car companies claim to have lost $16 billion last year, and even though Wall Street expects management to force workers into massive givebacks. Ford CEO Alan Mullaly told reporters earlier this year he will demand cuts in wages, benefits, work rules and health care.

But the UAW has its own demands, too. Besides retaining - or raising - wages and benefits and retaining health care for workers and retirees,
Gettelfinger said the car companies must invest in the United States, not abroad, and put the responsibility on management to design cars that consumers actually want to buy.

"The UAW does not believe the demise of the U.S. auto industry is inevitable. Rather, the future of the industry depends on decisions that will be made by corporate management, by the UAW, and by the federal government," he told a U.S. Senate-sponsored manufacturing summit in Detroit in June.

"For example, although the Ford Escape Hybrid is assembled in Kansas City by UAW members, it has much lower domestic content that a traditional Ford Escape, because the key hybrid components all come from Japan. In our judgment, there is no reason why these components cannot be built in this country."

Ford also recently bought a mothballed car parts plant in Romania, and plans to pump $930 million into revitalizing it - exporting several thousand jobs there.

Gettelfinger dismissed the Bush administration\'s argument, also made by Right Wing pundits, that lost jobs in the Big Three\'s workforce since 2000 are offset by increases in auto workers in foreign car-company owned "transplant" plants. Virtually all transplants are in the anti-union South, which the union has been unsuccessful in organizing.

"Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that the U.S. has lost 326,000 jobs in the motor vehicle and parts industry since February 2000. The main reason for this loss of automotive jobs is clear: Increasingly vehicles and components are being sourced from overseas operations," Gettelfinger told the manufacturing conference.

Another key issue in the talks will be retiree health care. Ford, GM and the UAW worked out agreements last year that shifted some retiree health care costs from the companies to retirees. But news reports say GM in particular wants to go all the way: Shifting retiree health care to plans run by the UAW, with big lump-sum payments by the Big Three to start the plans, called Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Associations.

UAW did that with bankrupt Dana Auto Parts, which kicked in $780 million in cash and stock to get that plan going, but doesn\'t have to pay anything else.

"That is a precursor to nothing," Gettelfinger told the Detroit News. "This is a company (Dana) that was in bankruptcy, and a lot of people were predicting we would not get anything in regards to people\'s health care."

"The UAW believes it would be immoral and irresponsible to abandon the hundreds of thousands of retirees who helped build General Motors, Ford and Chrysler," he told lawmakers at a D.C. hearing last month. "We simply cannot do that."

The automakers also want to eliminate a "jobs bank" which lets union members laid off in plant closings transfer to another facility. The UAW opposes eliminating it.

This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.