Members of the Auto Workers who toil for General Motors will vote in coming weeks on an agreement with the automaker that cuts its health care costs. But their ballots may not be the last word. And, even if approved, the pact won?t take effect for months.

That's because the health care cost changes affect not just the 118,000 active workers whom UAW represents at GM, but approximately half a million retirees and surviving spouses. And they're going to have a say in the struggle, too, in court.

Under federal law, GM retirees and survivors, joined by the union, filed a class-action complaint in federal court on Oct. 18. No date for that hearing has been set and it could be several months away.

Using past public statements by GM executives, the retirees, who have their own independent attorney, charged GM is trying to illegally and unilaterally cut their health care benefits. At the same time they filed the suit, UAW added a proposed settlement for the case: The agreement. Court rejection of the settlement would scuttle it.

That pact, which UAW leaders recommended, is designed to save GM more than $1 billion a year, by changing health care for both present workers and retirees.

"The tentative agreement on health care matters is the result of an in‑depth analysis of GM's financial situation and many weeks of intense discussion between the UAW and GM," UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President Richard Shoemaker said in a statement. "It is clearly in the best interests of UAW GM active workers and their families." Shoemaker heads the union's GM department.

Union Communications Director Paul Krell said he could not disclose whether the agreement included a GM promise to join the UAW in lobbying for universal health care coverage, similar to what the Canadian Auto Workers have.

News reports said retirees would pay $10 monthly for individual health care coverage and $21 monthly for family coverage, up from zero. Present UAW workers would give up a $1 an hour raise due next year.

The UAW-GM agreement on Oct. 17 came just a week after Delphi Auto Parts, once part of GM and now independent -- but still its top parts supplier -- filed for bankruptcy protection. Delphi refused to bargain with UAW over cost-cutting moves before it filed, and gave its 21 top execs better incentives to stay on. That irked UAW.

As part of its announcement, GM said that it would also close plants, cut 25,000 factory jobs, freeze bonuses, and cut health care benefits for its non-union workers. All those moves and the health care cuts, the company president said, are designed to save it $4 billion in costs over the next several years. GM says it lost $3 billion in the year that ended Sept. 30.

But GM did not hold the same bankruptcy threat over the UAW's head that Delphi did, Krell said.

"They don't look at bankruptcy as a business strategy," he explained. That differs from recent decisions by two airlines -- Delta and Northwest -- which filed for bankruptcy protection, in part to end their union contracts but also to shed their penssion liabilities by transferring them to the federal Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp.

Krell also said GM has billions of dollars in cash reserves to draw upon and a similar sum in its "voluntary employee benefit association" plan, a special fund which can be drawn upon to cover post-employment benefit costs for the retirees. By letting the money stay inactive, GM's balance sheet is better, he added.

Meanwhile, Delphi CEO Robert S. Miller, who took his firm into bankruptcy after turning a deaf ear to the UAW, told the New York Times the entire auto industry is headed for bankruptcy court unless Detroit's Big Three demand drastic cuts from the UAW in their next round of contract talks, in 2007. Delphi wants 50 percent pay cuts.

Miller, who also oversaw the bankruptcy of Bethlehem Steel -- then the nation's third-largest steel producer -- and sat on the board of United Air Lines when it filed for bankruptcy and shed its workers' pensions, called the Delphi bankruptcy filing "an incredible watershed for the entire industry as we head into the future."

Mark Gruenberg writes from Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.