(Ford Motor Company)

The UAW's contracts with GM and Chrysler were extended Wednesday night to allow negotiations to continue past a deadline; as part of the 2009 government bailout of the auto industry, workers agreed not to strike, so if a contract agreement cannot be reached, they will go to binding arbitration. The UAW's contract with Ford was extended earlier for the same reasons.

The UAW vice president in charge of negotiations with GM sent an optimistic message Wednesday, but the details of what is currently under negotiation are not publicly known. The broad outlines, though, have been in place for some time:

A major theme for the union during these talks has been regaining much of what workers gave up to keep their employers from collapsing under the weight of heavy debt and plummeting sales. But the union also wants to add jobs in the United States after suffering years of wrenching cutbacks at the three carmakers. Mr. King, the U.A.W. president, has said U.A.W. members each ceded $7,000 to $30,000 worth of pay and benefits since 2005. In 2007, the union agreed to create a two-tier wage system that allowed the carmakers to cut costs by hiring new workers at about half the pay of other workers.

The auto companies want to reduce labor costs. Currently, only around 4,000 workers are at the lower tier of wages. At $14 per hour, those jobs pay well enough to be considered good jobs these days, but they are surely not the basis for the rebuilding of the American middle class that auto and other manufacturing jobs did so much to build in past generations.

At Ford, workers have filed an "inequality of sacrifice" grievance after the company "reinstated merit pay raises and 401(k) matches for salaried workers, but not hourly workers."