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    Job Action Against Tesla Puts Sweden’s Unions in Spotlight

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    The automaker’s mechanics in Sweden are striking for a collective agreement, and dockworkers say they will support the battle. Tesla is expected to join the talks on Monday.More than a week after Tesla mechanics in Sweden began a strike to compel the U.S. automaker to accept a collective labor agreement, union officials said Tesla representatives would meet with the union on Monday.Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.Tesla doesn’t make cars in Sweden, and the country is a relatively small market for the automaker. But the job action by dozens of mechanics is beginning to reverberate. Dockworkers at the country’s four largest ports said they would stop unloading shiploads of Teslas on Tuesday in support of the strikers.The trade union IF Metall has for years called on the automaker to enter into talks about adopting a collective agreement that would set the basis for wages and benefits for the roughly 120 mechanics who are employed by Tesla to work at its service facilities in Sweden. About 90 percent of all workers in Sweden are covered by such agreements.Since the union called the strike on Oct. 27, dozens of the mechanics who are union members have been staying home, disrupting service appointments for some Tesla drivers. Not all of the union members have taken part, said Jesper Pettersson, a spokesman for IF Metall, acknowledging reports that some service facilities appeared largely unaffected.“It is not an easy thing to be on strike,” he added.But the action, combined with the threat of other unions getting involved, appeared to be enough to force Tesla to the bargaining table. A meeting between the union and company representatives was scheduled for Monday, Mr. Petterson said.Despite its relatively small size, Sweden has the world’s third-highest share of electric vehicle sales, at 32 percent, after Norway and Iceland, according to the World Resources Institute, a research organization. Tesla enjoys a growing fan base and its Model Y, a sport-utility vehicle manufactured in Germany, has been the top-selling electric vehicle in Sweden this year.Tesla’s owner, Elon Musk, has for years resisted efforts to unionize Tesla workers, and in 2018 threatened the compensation of U.S. employees seeking to join a union, (a statement later found to violate labor laws). German Bender, a labor market analyst at Arena, a think tank in Stockholm, said Tesla may “see this small conflict in Sweden as posing a risk of contagion to other markets.” In Germany, IG Metall, a union affiliated with Sweden’s IF Metall, has been seeking to organize Tesla’s factory in Grünheide, outside of Berlin. And in the United States, on the heels of the significant gains in wage and benefits won by the United Automobile Workers after a six-week wave of walkouts at the three big Detroit automakers, union’s leaders have set their sights on Tesla’s U.S. workers as part of a wider push to organize nonunion factories across the United States.The power of organized labor in Sweden is considerable. About 70 percent of the country’s work force belongs to a union, and Swedish law allows for solidarity strikes in support of other unions’ efforts.That is what happened in 1995, when another well-known U.S. company started doing business in Sweden. Toys “R” Us was unwilling to accept a collective labor agreement, and its retail workers in Sweden went on strike. Although the company employed only 80 people in the country, other unions rallied to their cause, including postal, transport and municipal workers who disrupted mail delivery and trash removal. After three months, the company signed an agreement.In support of IF Metall, the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union said that, starting at noon on Tuesday, dockworkers would not unload any more Tesla cars.“When IF Metall asks for Transport’s support, it is both important and obvious that we help, to stand up for the collective agreement and the Swedish labor market model,” the transport workers’ union said.IF Metall has not requested support from any other unions, pending the outcome of Monday’s talks, Mr. Pettersson said.Sweden relies on collective agreements hammered out between employers and unions within each industrial sector, to set basic terms for employment. Under the agreement that IF Metall is seeking, Tesla workers would gain a broader insurance package, guaranteed training to transition to a different job if theirs is cut and annual wage increases, the union said. Even workers who do not belong to a union are covered by collective agreements.Foreign-based firms are not the only ones reluctant to support the country’s century-old model of collective bargaining agreements. Some homegrown enterprises, like Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later giant, and the streaming provider Spotify have pushed back against them, citing the need to remain flexible and nimble in the rapidly changing tech industry.After eight months of negotiations, two of the unions representing employees at Klarna had threatened to walk off their jobs next week. They were able to secure an agreement late Friday, avoiding a strike, the company said. More

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    Job Growth Slows, Sowing a Mix of Concern and Calm

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    U.S. employers added 150,000 workers in October, falling short of expectations, but the labor market retains spark nearly three years into a recovery.The labor market has been relentlessly hot since the U.S. economy began to recover from the shock of the pandemic. But there are signs of cooling as the holidays approach.Employers added 150,000 jobs in October on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, a number that fell short of economists’ forecasts.Hiring figures for August and September were revised downward, subtracting more than 100,000 jobs from earlier reports. And the unemployment rate, based on a survey of households, rose to 3.9 percent from 3.8 percent in September.Unemployment ticked up in OctoberUnemployment rate More

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    Fed Holds Interest Rates Steady and Pledges to Proceed Carefully

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    The Federal Reserve left interest rates at 5.25 to 5.5 percent, but its chair, Jerome Powell, said policymakers could still raise rates again.The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged on Wednesday while keeping alive the possibility of a future increase, striking a cautious stance as rapid inflation retreats but is not yet vanquished.Rates have been on hold in a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent since July, up from near-zero as recently as March 2022. Policymakers think that borrowing costs are high enough to achieve their goal of curbing economic growth if they are kept at this level over time.By cooling demand, the Fed is hoping to prod companies to raise prices less quickly. While the economy has held up so far — growth was unusually strong over the summer — inflation has come down since 2022. Overall price increases decelerated to 3.4 percent as of September, from more than 7 percent at their peak.Fed policymakers are now trying to wrestle inflation the rest of the way back to 2 percent. The combination of economic resilience and moderating inflation has given officials hope that they might be able to slow growth gradually and relatively painlessly in a rare “soft landing.” At the same time, the economy’s surprising endurance is forcing the Fed to question whether it has done enough to tamp down demand and price increases.The major question facing Fed officials is whether they will need to make one final rate increase in the coming months, a possibility they left open on Wednesday.“The full effects of our tightening have yet to be felt,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said at a news conference after the decision. “Given how far we have come, along with the uncertainties and risks we face, the committee is proceeding carefully.”Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said Wednesday that policymakers had not determined whether further interest rate increases would be needed to get inflation down to 2 percent.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMr. Powell said officials would base decisions about the possibility and extent of additional policy firming — and how long rates will need to stay high — on economic data and how various risks to the outlook shaped up.Stock prices in the S&P 500 index rose as Mr. Powell spoke, and odds of further rate increases declined, suggesting that investors took his comments as a sign that interest rates were probably at their peak. But Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, said she thought markets were getting ahead of themselves.“They are not declaring victory,” she said, explaining that while she did not expect the Fed to move rates in December, an early-2024 move seemed possible. “They are hesitant to say, ‘We’re done.’”Other analysts suggested that by not pushing back on the market’s expectation that the Fed was done raising interest rates, Mr. Powell was essentially endorsing that view, barring an unexpected surprise.At the Fed’s previous meeting, in September, policymakers had forecast that one more quarter-point increase in rates would probably be appropriate before the end of 2023. But officials did not release updated economic projections on Wednesday — they are scheduled to do so after the Fed’s Dec. 12-13 meeting — and conditions have changed since their last assessment.That is because longer-term interest rates in markets have jumped higher. While the Fed sets short-term borrowing costs, longer-term rates adjust at more of a delay and for a variety of reasons.The recent rise has made everything from mortgages to business loans more expensive, which might help cool the economy. The change may make it less necessary for Fed officials to raise rates further.“Tighter financial and credit conditions for households and businesses are likely to weigh on economic activity, hiring and inflation,” the Fed said in its statement Wednesday, newly pointing to financial conditions as a restraint on growth.“It’s their way of saying that higher interest rates matter,” Gennadiy Goldberg, a rates strategist at TD Securities, said of the line. “Interest rates are doing some of the Fed’s work for them.”Mr. Powell made it clear that the Fed was closely watching higher market interest rates — particularly to see whether the jump was sustained, and to what extent it squeezed consumers and businesses.But Mr. Powell said the Fed’s staff economists were not predicting an imminent recession, which suggests that they do not see the higher borrowing costs hurting the economy too severely.And he said policymakers were still focused on whether interest rates were high enough to ensure that inflation would cool fully, given recent evidence of continued economic strength.“We are not confident yet that we have achieved such a stance,” Mr. Powell said.While the Fed’s moves have held back some parts of the economy, including sales of existing homes, the labor market continues to chug along. Hiring is still quicker than before the pandemic. Wage gains have cooled, but are also faster than pre-2020.As Americans win jobs and raises, they have continued to open their wallets. Spending climbed faster than economists expected in September, and growth overall has been much faster than what most forecasters would have expected a year and half into the Fed’s campaign to cool it.That strength could become a problem for central bankers, should it persist. If consumers remain ravenous for goods and services, companies may continue raising prices, making it more difficult to eliminate what is left of rapid inflation.At the same time, Fed officials do not want to brake too hard, which could unnecessarily cause a recession. Policy changes often act with a lag, and it can take months for the cumulative effects of interest rate increases to fully bite.“Everyone has been very gratified to see that we’ve been able to achieve pretty significant progress on inflation without seeing the kind of increase in unemployment that is very typical” with interest rate increases, Mr. Powell said. “The same is true of growth.”But he also made it clear that the Fed still thought a slowdown in the job market and overall growth were likely to prove necessary. Healing supply chains and a fresh supply of workers have helped to bring the economy into balance so far, but those forces may not be enough to bring inflation fully back to normal, he said.“What we do with demand is still going to be important,” he said, later adding that “slowing down is giving us, I think, a better sense of how much more we need to do, if we need to do more.” More

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    JOLTS Report Shows U.S. Job Openings Steady in September

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    The NewsJob openings changed little in September, the Labor Department announced on Wednesday.There were 9.6 million job openings in September, slightly up from August’s revised total of 9.5 million, according to seasonally adjusted figures from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The figure was greater than economists’ expectations of 9.3 million openings. The rate of workers quitting their jobs was flat, at 2.3 percent, for the third straight month.The Federal Reserve closely monitors job openings to understand whether the economy is running too hot.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesWhy It Matters: The Fed looks for signs of a soft landing.The Federal Reserve closely monitors job openings to understand whether the economy is running too hot. Since March 2022, the Fed has tried to fight inflation by raising interest rates to their highest level since 2001.The Fed has remained committed to hitting an annual inflation target of 2 percent without causing a significant spike in unemployment — a combined outcome known as a “soft landing.”Fed officials are expected to maintain a target range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent for interest rates when they meet on Wednesday. The overall trend of slowing job openings is a sign that rate increases have cooled the economy, according to experts.“All of this means the Fed probably doesn’t feel the need to raise rates further, but they’re not going to ease anytime soon,” said Sonu Varghese, global macro strategist at Carson Group, said of the report on job openings.Job openings, which reached a record of more than 12 million in March 2022, have trended down, as has the job-quitting rate, while separations have been flat. As openings rose slightly in September, the number of openings per unemployed worker was flat, at 1.5, the same as August.Less churn in the labor market indicates that rate increases are having an effect, said Julia Pollak, the chief economist at the job search website ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter’s latest survey of new employees found that the share of hires who received a pay increase, got a signing bonus or were recruited to their new jobs each fell.Background: ‘More wood to chop’ for the Fed.Job openings remain much higher than they were before the pandemic, and the number of unemployed workers per job opening is much lower. Both are signs of a tight labor market.Inflation also remains above the Fed’s 2 percent target. The Fed’s preferred inflation measure has fallen nearly four percentage points since the summer of 2022, to 3.4 percent.“The Fed’s primary focus remains inflation,” said Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo. “They’re reading the economy through the lens of ‘What does this mean for the path of inflation ahead?’”According to Stephen Juneau, an economist at Bank of America, the Fed still has “more wood to chop.” His team expects that the Fed will raise rates one more time, in December, to reach a soft landing.Economic growth in the third quarter accelerated, and another measure of wage growth grew faster than expected over the summer. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond, a key measure of long-term borrowing costs that undergirds nearly everything in the economy, has reached its highest level since 2007 as the outlook for growth has improved.What’s next: The October jobs report on Friday.The report on Wednesday morning kicked off an important few days in economic news. After Fed officials meet to decide whether to raise rates, October’s jobs report will be released on Friday by the Labor Department.The data is expected to show that hiring slowed, with the addition of 180,000 jobs, according to Bloomberg’s survey of economists, down from September’s 336,000. The unemployment rate is expected to tick up to 3.9 percent, after holding steady at 3.8 percent in September. More

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    A Key Measure of Wages Grew at a Moderate Pace This Summer

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    The Employment Cost Index, which Federal Reserve officials watch closely as a gauge of pay trends, has come down since last year.A measure of pay and benefits that officials at the Federal Reserve have been watching closely as they try to gauge the heat of the labor market grew at a moderate pace over the summer.The Employment Cost Index, a quarterly measure from the Labor Department that tracks changes in wages and benefits, climbed 1.1 percent in the third quarter of 2023 versus the prior three months. That was slightly faster than the 1 percent that economists expected and up from the previous 1 percent reading.That pace of growth does mark a deceleration from a series of rapid quarterly gains in 2022. And on an annual basis, wage gains continue to slow: The employment cost measure rose by 4.3 percent on a yearly basis, down from the 4.5 percent reading in the previous report.Still, the index averaged 2.2 percent yearly gains in the decade leading up to the pandemic, underscoring that today’s pace remains unusually quick. And it is notable that wage gains continue to come in strong at a time when economists had expected them to be returning to a more normal pace. The trend could present a challenge for officials at the Federal Reserve.Rapid wage gains are good news for households, but they can spell trouble for Fed policymakers. Central bankers often worry that it will be hard to fully snuff out inflation if pay gains are climbing quickly. Companies that are paying workers higher wages are likely to try to charge more to cover their costs.Fed officials are meeting this week to discuss what to do next with interest rates, and are widely expected to hold borrowing costs steady at the conclusion of their two-day meeting on Wednesday. Economists did not expect that to change in the wake of Tuesday’s wage data.“It’s more about waiting for the labor market to continue to normalize,” said Oscar Muñoz, chief U.S. macro strategist at TD Securities. “It is taking longer, but I think that the Fed can be patient.”Fed officials have already raised interest rates to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent, up from near-zero in March 2022, in their bid to slow inflation.Those higher rates make it more expensive to borrow money to buy a house, purchase a car or expand a business. As companies hire less voraciously and demand wanes, wage growth should slow and companies should find it more difficult to raise prices without losing customers. That chain reaction is expected to put a lid on inflation.But the labor market’s cool-down has been an unexpectedly bumpy one. Job gains have slowed somewhat, but they remain much faster than many economists had expected after so much Fed action.That has left Fed officials closely watching wages.If pay growth continues to calm even as companies hire at a solid clip, it would suggest that the continued job gains are being driven by an improving supply of applicants — and that the labor market is still slowly coming back into balance.The logic is simple: If the job market were running hot, companies would be paying more and more as they tried to poach needed employees from one another. That would keep pay gains climbing swiftly. If it is cooling toward a more normal level of tightness, economists would expect wage gains to pull back.So far, policymakers have been interpreting labor market data to mean that balance is in fact returning. That’s partly because another closely watched measure of wage growth, the average hourly earnings index, has been showing steady moderation.That gauge is useful because it comes out every month, but it is also susceptible to data quirks. It tends to move around as the composition of the work force shifts. If a lot of low-wage workers gain jobs, for instance, the hourly earnings measure can drift lower.Given that, Fed officials closely monitor the Employment Cost Index, which avoids some of the data pitfalls that afflict other wage measures.“Wage growth is slowing down, but not as much as other data sources have suggested,” Cory Stahle, economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, wrote in an analysis after the report. He added that “pay growth will likely keep slowing going forward, but the labor market continues to display notable resilience.” More

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    U.A.W. Strike Gains Could Reverberate Far Beyond Autos

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    Experts said the union’s new contracts could set precedents that give labor advantages when bargaining contracts and organizing workers.Laying out a tentative contract agreement to end a six-week wave of walkouts at Ford Motor, the United Automobile Workers president made an unusual pitch to other labor unions.“We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own,” the U.A.W. leader, Shawn Fain, said Sunday night.“If we’re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few,” Mr. Fain added, “then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.”While it remains to be seen whether other unions follow the U.A.W.’s lead, Mr. Fain’s invitation highlights the sweeping ambition of the union’s strategy during the recent strike, the first to target all three Detroit automakers simultaneously.Beyond seeking the largest wage and benefit increases in decades — and a reversal of the concessions the union made during the companies’ downturn, such as lower wage tiers for newer workers — Mr. Fain repeatedly spoke of fighting for “the entire working class.”Labor experts said the proposals that union negotiators agreed to with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Jeep, Ram and Chrysler, had produced gains that could in fact reverberate well beyond the workers that the union represented.“It is a historic and transformative victory by the U.A.W.,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Dr. Lichtenstein said that winning substantial gains through a strike in a critical industry demonstrated the benefits of work stoppages after decades in which workers had been taught to regard strikes warily.“Fain says: ‘Hey, strikes work, solidarity works; we’re more unified now than before the strike,’” he added. “I think that’s a powerful argument unions can take elsewhere.”To make the economy “work for the benefit of the many and not the few,” Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president said, “then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.”Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesEven before the strike ended, unions at other companies appeared to be doing just that.In an interview in late September, David Pryzbylski, a lawyer who represents employers, said union officials in two separate contract negotiations had invoked the U.A.W. when discussing the possibility of a strike. “Outside the U.A.W., it’s putting wind in their sails,” Mr. Pryzbylski said. “They may be blustering, but I am seeing it already trickle down.”A recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raised concerns that an emboldened labor movement was increasing strike activity and “causing collateral damage to a host of local businesses and communities” by harming the economic ecosystem that depended on automakers and other employers.The element of strategy that the U.A.W. brought to its strike may also prove instructive to other workers and unions. Rather than ask all employees to strike at once, the union started small, with one key plant at each of the Big Three, then ramped up as it sought to bring additional pressure. The U.A.W. refrained from expanding the strike when it felt a company was bargaining productively, and it expanded to a highly valuable plant when it felt a company was dragging its feet — in both cases, to create an incentive for the companies to engage with the union.The approach may not translate perfectly to other industries, such as retail and hospitality, that are harder to disrupt with the loss of a small number of locations. But Peter Olney, a former organizing director with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said the strategy was more widely applicable than it might appear at first glance.He cited the possibility of organizing and striking at coffee bean roasting plants and distribution centers for a company like Starbucks, where workers at hundreds of retail stores in the United States have organized over the past few years. “They have 9,000 locations, there’s a lot of redundancy and replication,” Mr. Olney said, referring to company-owned stores in the United States. “But there are some choke points in that system, too.”And it is difficult for service-sector industries to send operations offshore in response to labor unrest, because proximity to customers is critical. By contrast, the U.A.W. may have to contend with the risk that companies shift production to Mexico as labor costs increase.“That’s where the international solidarity aspect of it comes in — the need to build up a cross-border network with Mexico,” Mr. Olney said. Last year, workers at a large G.M. plant in the country voted out a union accused of colluding with management in favor of an independent union.In some ways, the recent U.A.W. effort builds on the gains made by unions involved in other high-profile standoffs. To resolve a nearly five-month strike with Hollywood writers in September, major studios agreed to a set of restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence. The agreement was a break with employers’ typical insistence that management should have control over technology and investment decisions.In its new contract with the union, Ford Motor agreed to let current U.A.W. members transfer to battery and electric vehicles plants the company was building in Michigan and Tennessee.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesThe tentative U.A.W. contracts award the union more influence over such decision-making as well — for example, by allowing workers to strike against the entire company over the threat of a plant shutdown before their contract has expired. The union also successfully pressed Stellantis to reopen an Illinois plant that the company had closed.Mr. Pryzbylski, the management-side lawyer, said that while such strike provisions and plant reopenings are not unheard of, they are uncommon.Dr. Lichtenstein said securing these gains in such a high-profile context could prompt employees at other companies to demand a say in decisions that their employers had typically characterized as management prerogatives. “It restores a kind of social and political character to investment decisions,” he said. “It’s something the left has wanted for over a century.”In other cases, the U.A.W. managed to extract concessions at plants where it doesn’t yet represent workers — another unusual win that could be mimicked by fellow unions. Ford agreed that U.A.W. members would be allowed to transfer into battery and electric vehicles plants under construction in Michigan and Tennessee, and that these plants would fall under the union’s national contract if the workers unionized there. According to the U.A.W., that would happen without the need to hold a union election at either site.Madeline Janis, co-executive director of Jobs to Move America, a group that seeks to create good jobs in clean technology industries, called these arrangements a “huge historic, unprecedented deal” for helping to ensure that the E.V. transition benefited workers.U.A.W. officials say that adding new members is critical to the union’s survival, and that the Big Three contracts will provide a major boost to these efforts because organizers can point to large concrete benefits of unionizing.“We’re not going to win a contract victory this big in the future if we’re not able to start organizing, especially in the E.V. sector,” said Mike Miller, a U.A.W. regional director in the Western United States. “It has to involve Tesla, Volkswagen and Hyundai.”But some experts said the momentum of the recent contracts could help organizing campaigns that were even further afield. “It’s not just personal vehicle manufacturing — it’s the fleets of delivery vans, big electric buses and trains,” said Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, which helps workers seeking to unionize and bargain collectively.Ms. Smiley noted that many of these companies, just like electric vehicle manufacturers, had received public subsidies, creating an opportunity for organizers to appeal to politicians for help raising pay and improving benefits so that they more closely resembled what the U.A.W. just won.“The administration is investing in these industries,” she added. “The question is how to use this to raise the floor.” More

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    U.A.W. Strikes Near an End After G.M. Reaches Tentative Deal

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    Tentative accords at Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis are the most generous in decades, raising costs as the industry shifts to electric vehicles.A six-week wave of strikes that hobbled the three largest U.S. automakers has resulted in tentative contract agreements that would give workers their biggest pay raises in decades while avoiding a protracted work stoppage that could have damaged the economy.On Monday, General Motors and the United Automobile Workers reached a deal that mirrored agreements the union had reached in recent days with Ford Motor and Stellantis, the parent company of Ram, Jeep and Chrysler. The terms will be costly for the automakers as they undertake a switch to electric vehicles, while setting the stage for labor strife and demands for higher pay at nonunion automakers like Tesla and Toyota.The tentative agreements, which still require ratification by union members, also appeared to be a win for President Biden, who had risked political capital by picketing with striking workers at a G.M. facility in Michigan last month.“They have reached a historic agreement,” Mr. Biden said Monday after speaking with Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president. The deals, the president said, “reward autoworkers who gave up much to keep the industry working and going during the global financial crisis more than a decade ago.”The strike stretched longer than White House officials would have liked, but was resolved before causing significant shortages of new cars and trucks that might have frustrated voters already angry about inflation.“The near-term impact of this strike will be relatively minor,” said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars.com, an online auto sales site. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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    U.A.W. Reaches Tentative Deal With Stellantis, Following Ford

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    The United Automobile Workers union announced the deal with Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram. It also expanded its strike against G.M.The United Automobile Workers union announced on Saturday that it had reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract with Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram.The agreement came three days after the union and Ford Motor announced a tentative agreement on a new contract. The two deals contain many of the same or similar terms, including a 25 percent general wage increase for U.A.W. members as well as the possibility for cost-of-living wage adjustments if inflation flares.“We have won a record-breaking contract,” the U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain, said in a video posted on Facebook. “We truly believe we got every penny possible out of the company.”Shortly after announcing the tentative agreement with Stellantis, the union expanded its strike against General Motors, calling on workers to walk off the job at the company’s plant in Spring Hill, Tenn. The plant makes sport utility vehicles for G.M.’s Cadillac and GMC divisions.Under the tentative new contract with Stellantis, Mr. Fain said, the company has agreed to reopen a plant in Belvidere, Ill., to produce a midsize pickup truck and to rehire enough workers to staff two shifts of production.The union also won commitments to keep an engine plant in Trenton Mich., open, and to keep and expand a machining plant in Toledo, Ohio. According to the union, these moves will create up to 5,000 new U.A.W. jobs.The union also won the right to strike if the company closes any plant and if it fails to follow through on its promised investment plans, Mr. Fain said.“If the company goes back on their words on any plant, we can strike the hell out of them,” he said.Mr. Fain said Stellantis workers would now return to their jobs.In a statement, Stellantis said, “We look forward to welcoming our 43,000 employees back to work and resuming operations to serve our customers.”The tentative agreement with Stellantis will require approval by a union council that oversees negotiations with the company, and then ratification by U.A.W. members. The council will meet on Thursday, Mr. Fain said.The deal with Stellantis means that only General Motors has not yet reached an agreement with the U.A.W.Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan who follows the auto industry, said the new contracts impose higher labor costs on the Detroit manufacturers as they are ramping up production of electric vehicles and are competing with rivals who operate nonunion plants.“The Detroit Three enter a new, dangerous era,” he said. “They have to figure out how to transition to EVs and do it with a cost structure that puts them at a disadvantage with global competitors.”The union’s contracts with the three automakers expired on Sept. 15. Since then, the union has called on more than 45,000 autoworkers at the three companies to walk off the job at factories and at 38 spare-parts warehouses across the country.The most recent escalation of the strike at Stellantis came on Monday when the U.A.W. told workers to go on strike at a Ram plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., that makes the popular 1500 pickup truck. The strike has halted the production of Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators at a plant in Toledo, Ohio, and 20 Stellantis parts warehouses.For decades, the union has negotiated similar contracts with all three automakers, a method known as pattern bargaining. Like the contract it hammered out with Ford, the tentative Stellantis deal would lift the top U.A.W. wage from $32 an hour to more than $40 over four and a half years. That would allow employees working 40 hours a week to earn about $84,000 a year.Stellantis, G.M. and Ford began negotiating with the U.A.W. in July. The companies have sought to limit increases in labor costs because they already have higher labor costs than automakers like Tesla, Toyota and Honda that operate nonunion plants in the United States.The three large U.S. automakers are also trying to control costs while investing tens of billions of dollars to develop new electric vehicles, build battery plants and retool factories.Stellantis, which is based in Amsterdam, was created in 2021 by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, the French automaker. The company’s North American business, based near Detroit, is its most profitable.Stellantis surprised analysts recently by posting much stronger profits than G.M., which is the largest U.S. automaker by sales. Stellantis earned 11 billion euros ($11.6 billion) in the first half of the year while G.M. made nearly $5 billion.Noam Scheiber More