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The United Auto Workers and General Motors have agreed to a deal that will put an end to collective bargaining talks between the union and Detroit automakers.
GM is the final Detroit automaker to reach a deal with the union following historically contentious talks.
The 4½-year tentative agreements must still be ratified by members at each of the automakers.

DETROIT — The United Auto Workers and General Motors have agreed to a deal that will put an end to bargaining between the union and Detroit automakers following more than six weeks of targeted U.S. labor strikes, the sides confirmed hours after sources told CNBC about the deal.
GM is the final Detroit automaker to reach a deal with the union following historically contentious talks. Roughly a third of the union’s 146,000 workers with GM, Ford Motor and Stellantis went on strike after the sides failed to reach agreements by a Sept. 14 deadline.

The UAW said the tentative agreement, which still must be ratified by members, adds battery workers from GM’s Ultium Cells joint venture and a division know as “subsystems” into the union’s master agreement with the company.
GM is the only Detroit automaker with a joint venture battery plant in operation and unionized — making it the first in the country to face this particular negotiating dynamic and a landmark plant to set standards for the industry.
“Like the agreements with Ford and Stellantis, the GM agreement has turned record profits into a record contract,” the UAW said in a release. “The deal includes gains valued at more than four times the gains from the union’s 2019 contract.”
A GM spokesman confirmed the tentative agreement but declined to discuss specifics of the deal.
“GM is pleased to have reached a tentative agreement with the UAW that reflects the contributions of the team while enabling us to continue to invest in our future and provide good jobs in the U.S.,” GM CEO Mary Barra said in a statement. “We are looking forward to having everyone back to work across all of our operations, delivering great products for our customers, and winning as one team.” 

United Auto Workers (UAW) members strike at a General Motors assembly plant that builds the U.S. automaker’s full-size sport utility vehicles, in another expansion of the strike in Arlington, Texas, October 24, 2023.
James Breeden | Reuters

Two sources familiar with the GM-UAW talks said negotiations occurred Sunday night and into the early morning to reach an agreement. News of a deal was first reported Monday by Bloomberg.
Ford Motor was the first to reach a tentative agreement with the union, on Wednesday, followed by a deal with Chrysler parent Stellantis on Saturday.
The 4½-year tentative agreements must still be ratified by members at each of the automakers. The headline economics of the deals, such as 25% wage increases for most workers, were patterned off Ford’s initial deal.
The pact includes 25% pay increases over the terms of the agreement. The raises and benefits such as cost-of-living adjustments cumulatively raise the top wage to more than $42 an hour, including an increase of 70% for starting wages to over $30 an hour, the union said. That increase would be at least two percentage points higher than the Ford and Stellantis deals.
A UAW spokesman did not immediately respond for the difference in starting pay. However, it may be based off of cost-of-living adjustment estimates.
Those deals also reinstated cost-of-living adjustments, reduced an eight-year path to top wages to three years and allowed the right to strike over plant closures, among other significantly enhanced benefits.
The strikes have collectively cost GM, Ford and Stellantis billions of dollars in lost production. Ford said Thursday that the union’s strike has cost it $1.3 billion and the deal, if ratified by members, would increase labor costs by roughly $850 to $900 per vehicle produced.
GM said Tuesday the strike had cost it about $800 million.
The proposed agreements are record-setting for the union, which was far more confrontational and strategic during the talks than in recent history.
The union initiated negotiations with all three automakers at once. This was a break from recent history when UAW leaders would bargain with each automaker individually, select a lead company to focus efforts on and then pattern the remaining deals off a leading tentative agreement.

U.S. President Joe Biden gestures as he walks to board Air Force One on return travel to Washington, from Delaware Air National Guard Base in New Castle, Delaware, U.S., October 30, 2023.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters

It’s not immediately clear how much the labor deals will increase labor costs for the companies, which had argued that giving in to all of the union’s demands would affect their competitiveness and even long-term viability.
Deutsche Bank recently estimated the overall cost increase of the agreement at Ford to be $6.2 billion over the term of the agreement, $7.2 billion at GM, and $6.4 billion at Stellantis.
President Joe Biden, meanwhile, applauded the deals across and said he spoke with UAW President Shawn Fain on Monday.
“These record agreements reward autoworkers who gave up much to keep the industry working and going during the financial crisis more than a decade ago,” Biden said at the White House. “These agreements ensure that the Big Three can still lead the world in quality and innovation.”
–CNBC’s Emma Kinery contributed to this article.
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Hiring processes can be thought of as a battle between candour and dishonesty. You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves are prone to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.Start with the obvious culprits: job applicants. The point of a CV or a LinkedIn profile is to massage reality into the most appealing shape possible. Everyone beyond a certain level of experience is a transformational leader personally responsible for generating millions in revenue; the world economy would be about 15 times bigger than it actually is if all such claims were true. The average Briton spends four and a half hours a day watching TV and online video. But the average job candidate uses their spare time only for worthy purposes, like volunteering in soup kitchens or teaching orphans to code.The cover letter is so open in its insincerity (“When I saw the advertisement for this job, I almost fainted with excitement”) that people are starting not to bother with it. At the interview stage one task facing the firm’s recruiters is to winkle out the truth of what a person actually contributed to a project. Those hoary questions about a candidate’s weaknesses and failures are there for a reason; no one will bring them up unprompted. Cognitive and behavioural tests are useful in part because they are harder for applicants to game.But a tendency to stretch the truth infects companies as well as applicants. The typical firm will write a job description that invariably describes the work environment as fast-paced and innovative, and then lays out a set of improbable requirements for the “ideal candidate”, someone who almost by definition does not exist. Sometimes—as when ads demand more years of experience in a programming language than that program has existed for—these requirements include an ability to go back and alter the course of history.Industrialised hiring processes can often reward mindless exaggeration. Services that scan your résumé when you are making an application mark you down if your CV does not match the keywords that appear in the original job advertisement. The message is clear: to get through to the next stage, you have to contort yourself to meet corporate expectations.Substance can matter less to recruiters than form. One software engineer claims to have got a 90%-plus response rate with a spoof CV which showed apparent spells at Microsoft and Instagram but also boasted, among other things, that she had increased team-bonding by organising the company potato-sack race and “spread Herpes STD to 60% of intern team”. References are so prone to inaccuracy that many firms have a policy of not giving them, fearing legal action from defamed candidates or deceived employers.Too few firms offer an accurate account of what a position actually involves. Tracey Franklin, the chief HR officer for Moderna, a fast-growing drugmaker—and an interviewee in this week’s episode of Boss Class, our new podcast—is a fan of “realistic job previews” (RJPs). These are meant to give prospective recruits a genuine sense of the negatives and positives of the job, as well as a clear idea of the company’s corporate culture. One effective tactic is to lay out, in text or video, what a typical day in the role would look like.Such honesty can be its own reward. Longstanding research suggests that RJPs lead to lower turnover and higher employee satisfaction. A paper in 2011 by David Earnest of Towson University and his co-authors concluded that favourable perceptions of the organisation’s honesty are the best explanation for why.The incentives on both sides of the hiring process lean naturally towards glossing reality. If candidates were to give genuinely truthful answers (“I have a habit of making basic but calamitous errors”), many would rule themselves out of jobs. And if firms were to give a warts-and-all description of themselves, many would end up deterring good applicants. But a process designed to uncover the truth about job applicants would run a lot more smoothly if firms were also honest about themselves. ■Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:Would you rather be a manager or a leader? (Oct 26th)How big is the role of luck in career success? (Oct 19th)Trialling the two-day workweek (Oct 12th)Also: How the Bartleby column got its name More

The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency announced about $1.3 billion in contracts to York Space and Northrop Grumman to build communications satellites.
The SDA is having the companies build 100 satellites as part of the network the agency is building, known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.
Under the latest awards, Northrop Grumman will build 38 “data transport” satellites for $732 million, while York will build 62 satellites for $617 million.

An artist illustration shows the functions of the Space Development Agency’s satellite constellation.
Space Development Agency

The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency on Monday announced about $1.3 billion in contracts to York Space and Northrop Grumman to build communications satellites.
The SDA is having the pair of companies build 100 satellites as part of a network the U.S. military is building called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. These satellites will be for “Alpha” variant prototypes in the “Tranche 2 Transport Layer” constellation, also known as T2TL-Alpha, to provide encrypted communications.

Under the T2TL-Alpha awards, Northrop will build 38 “data transport” satellites for $732 million, while York will build 62 satellites for $617 million. The SDA’s schedule is for the T2TL satellites to begin launching in 2026.

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Northrop’s award to build Alpha variant satellites for T2TL comes months after the defense giant won an SDA order for Beta variants. In August, Northrop won a $733 million award to build 36 satellites for the T2TL-Beta segment of PWSA, alongside Lockheed Martin.
The Pentagon is increasingly ambitious in space, seeing a need to keep up with China’s growing capabilities in a domain that has widespread ramifications for national security efforts back on Earth. The Space Force has especially seen its budget grow, with $30 billion requested for fiscal 2024. Much of that funding goes to defense contractors and space companies providing products and services to the military.
The first satellites of SDA’s system launched in April. Those Tranche 0 satellites were the first effort to demonstrate the feasibility of SDA’s network.
The SDA has previously awarded contracts to build and operate satellites in its fleet to SpaceX and L3Harris, in addition to Northrop, York and Lockheed.Don’t miss these CNBC PRO stories: More

Fast-food workers in California will start making at least $20 an hour in April due to a compromise between the restaurant industry and labor groups.
Both McDonald’s and Chipotle Mexican Grill said customers in California will pay more to offset the rise in labor costs as a result.
McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the minimum wage hike could help the burger chain gain market share in California in the long term.

Chipotle and McDonald’s fast-food restaurants in Chinatown in Washington, D.C.
Jeff Greenberg | Universal Images Group | Getty Images

McDonald’s and Chipotle Mexican Grill will raise their menu prices in California next year to offset the state’s minimum wage increase for fast-food workers, executives said as both chains announced quarterly earnings in recent days.
McDonald’s has not decided how much it will hike prices in California as workers’ wages rise to $20 an hour, CEO Chris Kempczinski said Monday. Chipotle expects it will raise prices by a “mid-to-high single-digit” percentage in the state, but has not made a “final decision,” its Chief Financial Officer Jack Hartung told analysts on the company’s conference call Thursday.

Restaurants have been hiking menu prices for more than two years in response to rising ingredient and labor costs. Prices for food away from home were up 6% in September compared to a year ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While diners are already used to paying more for their meals, some have been eating out less often to mind their budgets. McDonald’s executives said Monday that consumers making under $45,000 have been visiting less frequently, contributing to a dip in its U.S. traffic this quarter.
In September, the restaurant industry and labor groups ended an expensive, monthslong battle over a bill that would have created a 10-person council that governs fast-food chains in California by setting guidelines for working conditions and wages.
Instead, the two sides settled on a compromise: a nine-person council that only has the power to set the pay floor for the fast-food industry in the state through 2029. Chains with at least 60 locations nationwide will have to pay their workers at least $20 an hour, starting April 1. Between 2025 and 2029, the appointed council will have the authority to raise the hourly minimum wage annually by whichever is lower: 3.5% or the annual change in the consumer price index.
For Chipotle, the new pay floor means it will hike its wages roughly 18%. Hartung said the chain’s average wage in the state is currently $17 an hour.

As wages rise, Chipotle customers will pay much more for their burritos and bowls in California, which is home to roughly 15% of Chipotle’s restaurants — and the company’s headquarters.
The chain has already raised prices four times since June 2021. The most recent price increase of 3% happened earlier in October.
At McDonald’s, price increases will only be one method to offset the higher labor costs. The chain will likely also look at ways to improve productivity to cut restaurant-level costs, Kempczinski said Monday.
Unlike Chipotle, which owns the overwhelming majority of its locations, most of McDonald’s California locations are run by franchisees. They have the freedom to decide prices, although the chain provides advice on the best strategy. Just under 10% of McDonald’s U.S. restaurants are located in California.
The burger chain anticipates that operators there will feel the pain of the wage hike in the short term.
“There will certainly be a hit in the short term to franchisee cash flow in California,” Kempczinski said on the company’s conference call, adding that it’s unclear at this point how big the blow will be.
The National Owners Association, an independent advocacy group of more than 1,000 McDonald’s U.S. franchisees, projected the bill will cost each restaurant in the state $250,000 annually, according to a September memo viewed by CNBC. McDonald’s, which dealt with franchisee backlash for its role in the compromise’s negotiations, declined to comment at the time on the NOA’s estimates.
In the long term, McDonald’s thinks that the higher wages could be a boon to its business.
“We believe we’re in a better position than our competitors to weather this, so let’s use this as an opportunity to actually accelerate our growth in California,” Kempczinski said.Don’t miss these CNBC PRO stories: More

Shein has acquired British fast fashion brand Missguided from the Frasers Group.
The Chinese-founded retailer will manufacture Missguided’s products and sell them on both companies’ websites.
Shein, which is rumored to be exploring a U.S. IPO, is looking to expand its marketplace and offer a broader range of products to its 150 million customers.

Clothes displayed at the Shein headquarters in Singapore on June 19, 2023.
Ore Huiying | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Shein has bought British fast fashion brand Missguided from the Frasers Group as the company looks to expand its market share and global reach ahead of a rumored U.S. initial public offering, the companies announced Monday. 
The acquisition will see Shein manufacture Missguided’s products and sell them on both companies’ websites as an independent brand, while Frasers will retain Missguided’s real estate and employees, according to news releases. 

As part of the deal, Shein will license Missguided’s intellectual property to Sumwon Studios, a joint venture between Shein and Missguided founder Nitin Passi. Sumwon will manage and operate the Missguided brand.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 
The acquisition comes just over a year after the Frasers Group bought Missguided out of administration, or the British version of bankruptcy, for £20 million ($24.3 million). 
The brand gained prominence when it went viral for selling £1 bikinis and became a major player in British fast fashion. But it later found itself in dire financial straits and could not pay its suppliers.
Shein’s acquisition of Missguided comes as the company looks to expand its marketplace model and offer a broader range of products to its 150 million customers. The deal will allow Shein to grow its market share and deepen its global penetration.

Missguided’s assortment is similar to lines carried by its new parent company because the brand is focused on the latest trends and skews lower in price. Even so, its products can be more expensive than Shein’s, and could attract a different demographic. 
“The joint venture we have entered ushers in a new format of partnerships for Shein,” Donald Tang, Shein’s executive chairman, said in a news release. “Shein aims to reignite the Missguided brand, capitalising on its unique brand personality, and fuelling its global growth through SHEIN’s on-demand production model, unparalleled e-commerce expertise and global reach.”
Last week, Shein announced plans to launch a co-branded clothing line with former rival Forever 21 after the two retailers partnered up in a joint venture earlier this year. Under the agreement, Shein took a stake in Forever 21’s operator Sparc Group, which includes brand management firm Authentic Brands Group and mall owner Simon Property Group. Shein also began selling its clothes in Forever 21’s stores.Don’t miss these CNBC PRO stories: More

“Sesame Street” will revamp its format as its five-year deal with streaming giant Max is set to expire.
It means an end to the classic show’s magazine-style format, which will be replaced with two narrative-form segments pieced together with an animated segment.
The changes are the most significant to the iconic children’s show since 2016, when the length was changed from one hour to 30 minutes.

Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie during the presentation of the NDR and Deutsche Post commemorative stamp of ‘Sesamstrasse’ on March 2, 2020 in Hamburg, Germany.
Tristar Media | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

“Sesame Street” will soon have a new format as it turns the page on season 55, ending the children’s show’s magazine-style structure, Sesame Workshop executives told The Hollywood Reporter.
The new format coincides with the end of the show’s five-year rights deal with Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming giant Max. The changes are the most significant since 2016, when the show changed its length from one hour to 30 minutes. The revamped “Sesame Street” will debut in 2025.

The long-running children’s show featuring characters such as Elmo and Big Bird has faced a dramatic past few years as it moved its library to HBO Max, now Max. Since that move, the show’s previous home, PBS, has been getting episodes nine months after they premiere. Last year, Max yanked about 200 older episodes of “Sesame Street” as the streaming service refined content for its target audience, which isn’t children.
The new show’s most significant renovation will be changing the content style to two 11-minute narrative-driven segments pieced together by a new animated series called “Tales from 123,” the executives told The Hollywood Reporter. The change allows the writer’s room to develop two storylines that can play off each other to create a more nuanced experience for the viewers, they said.
“With any change, you have evolutions, and then you have things that are slightly bigger steps, while still staying core to who we are,” Steve Youngwood, the CEO of Sesame Workshop, told the trade publication. “We felt like this was a moment to step back and think bigger about how we evolve it.”
The revamp has been planned for some time, and it’s a coincidence that the change aligns with the end of the Max deal, according to the report. The show’s current deal with Max ends after season 55, which is set to begin about a year from now. Sesame Workshop has not indicated whether it will renew the deal or go elsewhere.
“The fact that it aligns with where we go after the current Warner deal is over, it just happens to be where the timing is,” Youngwood told the publication. “We always want to be relevant to the audience. We always want to give the audience some reasons to watch the new [episodes], while they can still watch the library.”
A representative for Max didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. More

Canadian union Unifor and Stellantis have reached a tentative agreement Monday morning.
The deal ended a brief strike that began after a deal wasn’t reached by 11:59 p.m. Sunday.
The Unifor deal came on the heels of Stellantis’ agreement with the UAW.

Lana Payne celebrates on stage as Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, announce Payne as their new president to replace outgoing leader Jerry Dias in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Aug. 10, 2022.
Cole Burston | Reuters

DETROIT — Canadian union Unifor and Stellantis have reached a tentative agreement early Monday morning, ending a brief strike that began after a deal wasn’t reached by 11:59 p.m. Sunday.
The Canadian work stoppage involved more than 8,200 autoworkers at several facilities in the Canadian province of Ontario, including two large assembly plants that produce the Chrysler 300 sedan and Pacifica minivan and the Dodge Challenger and Charger muscle cars.

The strike and tentative deal, which must still be ratified by union members, occurred two days after Stellantis reached a tentative deal for about 43,000 U.S. autoworkers with the United Auto Workers union after roughly six weeks of targeted strikes that began Sept. 15.
Details of the tentative agreement between Unifor and Stellantis were not immediately available. The deal was patterned off a ratified agreement between the union and Ford Motor. That deal included hourly wage increases of up to 25%, reactivation of a cost-of-living allowance to battle inflation and a shorter progression for workers to reach top pay, among other new or altered benefits.
“I am very proud of the negotiating teams and thankful for their commitment and focused effort in reaching a tentative agreement with Unifor,” Stellantis North America COO Mark Stewart said in a statement.
Unifor National President Lana Payne on X, formerly known as Twitter, thanked the “bargaining committee and members! Solidarity. Always.”
The Canadian work stoppage and tentative deal occurred nearly three weeks after Unifor launched a roughly 12-hour national strike against General Motors after the sides failed to reach a tentative agreement by a union-set deadline.

Unifor, which represents 18,000 Canadian workers at the Detroit automakers, took a more traditional approach to its negotiations than its U.S. counterpart. The Canadian union is negotiating with each automaker separately and using a deal first reached last month with Ford as a pattern for GM and Stellantis.
That traditional patterned-bargaining approach runs counter to the UAW’s new strategy of bargaining with all three automakers at once. The American auto union has reached tentative agreements with Ford and Stellantis but not GM. More

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” grossed a surprising $78 million in its domestic opening weekend.
The movie benefited from a PG-13 rating, which helped draw in its younger fanbase.
It was the second-highest opening weekend for a video game adaptation.

A scene from the film “Five Nights at Freddy’s”
Universal Pictures

If anything was going to topple Taylor Swift at the box office, it had to be a killer animatronic bear, right?
“Five Nights at Freddy’s,” the new Universal-Blumhouse horror offering set in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-type kids’ pizza parlor, scored an estimated $78 million at domestic theaters over the weekend, a huge haul that surprised many in the industry. Swift’s “Eras Tour” concert film came second for the weekend, with an estimated $14.7 million, putting its domestic total at $149.3 million.

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” had a few things going for it. First, it was Halloween weekend, primetime for spooky movies. In fact, the flick made more in its first weekend than fellow Universal-Blumhouse horror collaboration “The Exorcist: Believer” has made in its entire domestic run so far (an estimated $59.4 million, according to Comscore).
“Five Nights” is also based on a popular horror-survival video game series that gave it a built-in younger audience. That helped it overcome generally awful reviews that left the film with a 26% “rotten” rating on movie-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Data firm EntTelligence said the movie accounted for 65% of foot traffic to theaters during the weekend. Audiences liked it, as well, giving it a strong A-minus rating, according to Cinemascore.
The movie’s PG-13 rating no doubt helped parents decide to let their kids see it, vindicating director Emma Tammi’s decision to make it a “gateway” horror movie for youngsters. (Don’t count on an R-rated cut, either.)

Freddy Fazbear and director Emma Tammi on the set of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Photo: Patti Perret/Universal Pictures
Patti Perret | Universal Pictures

“The success of ‘Five Nights’ was the culmination of many factors not the least of which was making the film accessible to younger fans via the less restrictive PG-13 rating,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.

The “Five Nights” fanbase propelled it to the third-biggest domestic opening weekend for a horror movie, behind both chapters of Warner Bros.’ recent “It” movies. It also cleared the bar set by 2018’s “Halloween” as Blumhouse’s biggest opening, according to Universal.
Fans also gave it the second-biggest weekend ever for a video game adaptation, behind Universal and Nintendo’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which grossed more than $146 million in its first frame earlier this year.
“Given the high level of interest by teen audiences, these key moviegoers were clearly inspired to migrate from their gaming small screens to the big screen to enjoy a communal, in theater experience that drove weekend grosses to much higher than expected levels for ‘Freddy’s,'” Dergarabedian said.
The movie scored success at theaters even as it premiered on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, at the same time. Universal said the movie is on pace to have the biggest-ever opening on the streamer.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of Universal Pictures, Peacock and CNBC. More