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Two years ago, Ron Gettelfinger, president of the United Automobile Workers, has provided an severe prognosis for the automotive industry for union members to the Convention of the group from Las Vegas.
“This is not cyclical downturn,” said Mr. Gettelfinger silent crowd. “The kinds of challenges we face are not the kind that can be ridden out. They’re structural challenges and they need new solutions and lucid.”
Now Mr. Gettelfinger and his union, representing 139,000 workers from Detroit carmakers are under pressure to find drastic solutions, even that could not anticipate. From the UAW’s 2006 Convention, Detroit automakers have lost more than $ 80 billion, including one-time charges, shed more than 119,000 workers.
Even more urgently, software crisis of the economy and credit have pushed Detroit into free fall. General Motors and Chrysler goes through are cash so quickly that many analysts say they believe that more wind up in bankruptcy, and carmakers, with Ford Motor, have asked Congress for help.
This week, they will present their plans to make the case that any money from the government will be well spent.

In the days of hearings led to bailout two weeks ago, and during his testimony before Congress, Mr. Gettelfinger insisted the UAW would not make further concessions on top of those granted by carmakers in recent years.

“The UAW can not be a low-hanging fruit,” he said during a Senate hearing on November 18, who joined the car company executives in seeking government loans. “While you’re at the table, we ask that others come in and sacrifice as well.”

Later, Detroit, at a press conference, he declined to predict what Congress might seek. “Let’s wait and see,” said reporters, “and then we’ll make a decision at that time.”

But any plans to collectively Detroit, if they are to win over Congress, may require additional cost-saving concessions from the UAW

While the union has not agreed to reopen contracts at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, industry analysts say it seems inevitable that it will have to do, and that some of the most hard-fought with the UAW earnings shrink in May If not disappear completely.

“He can not take anything on the table,” said David L. Gregory, a professor of labor studies at St. John’s University in Queens. “In many ways, the end of the dream of post-World War II work force.”

Even one of the biggest supporters of union, the president-elect Barack Obama, provided the current situation in his own speech to the convention in 2006.

“I need you all to fight for the future,” Mr. Obama, then a U.S. senator from Illinois, told the delegates via satellite. “We need all of you to be open to creative ways of doing business. None of us can afford to watch the American auto industry does not.”

It is a message he has repeated in recent weeks, urging Congress to approve the aid money. Mr. Obama also insisted, however, that the auto companies should not receive a “blank check”.

If history is any guide, the union can be told by lawmakers to agree to hundreds of millions of dollars in several installments, where carmakers are to get their money.

That is what lawmakers asked in 1979 during discussions over loan guarantees that were given to Chrysler. For U.A.W. agreed finally to an additional $ 259 million in concessions in the form of reduced wage and benefit, on top of $ 203 million in givebacks granted during contract negotiations.

In the final year of contract negotiations, the UAW agreed to a series of cuts aimed at helping the struggling auto companies, including a two-tier wage system that pays sharply lower rates to new workers hired, and those in jobs away from the assembly line. Some union echo Mr. Gettelfinger’s comments that these reductions, which are still being adopted, were enough.

“People need to realize that we have just been through a lot of concessions,” said Eldon Renaud, president of Local 2164 in Bowling Green, Ky.

But Mr. Renaud said he was sure that Mr. Gettelfinger and union leaders were “keeping an open mind, because the bottom line is that we are all in this together.”

Mr. Renaud was working in the UAW’s political action group during the bailout in 1979, and recalled that the heated debate. “People have said,” Go down. “But Americans realized then, and they will again this time, that the country has to have a strong manufacturing sector,” said Mr. Renaud.

A U.A.W. spokesman declined to comment on the nature of Mr. Gettelfinger of talks with leaders from the Detroit auto companies.

For any reductions to take place, union probably will have to reopen contracts to agree with every auto company, and likely negotiate separate deals.

Among the possible areas that could be cut is a program that pays workers whose jobs were eliminated until they can find work in other factories.

In the past, there were thousands of workers from each company in the program, called Jobs Bank at GM But it was amended in 2007 to reduce contract benefits, and now, the program covers only 3591 workers from the three companies, Mr. Gettelfinger said at press conference last week.

The Big Three also may ask you to delay billions of dollars they planned to contribute to a health fund called the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA, which was meant to shift their burden for retiree benefits care health, which would then be up to the VEBA to manage.

Some critics have taken aim at automakers’ hourly labor costs, which average more than $ 70 for senior workers, including wages and the value of benefits like pensions and health.

These costs run closer to 46 U.S. dollars per hour to nonunion plants as a Toyota factory in Georgetown, Ky., And even fewer are newer plants from farther South, where foreign automakers have pegged salaries closer to local rate.

Heath care and pensions seem to be the biggest hot buttons for UAW members, including Doug Hanscom, who worked at the GM plant in Wilmington, Del. For 32 years.

“I know one thing: if I lose my pension, I bet that Rick Wagoner - GM CEO -” and all those guys will not lose theirs, “said Mr. Hanscom, 56, who plans to retire in 2010.

He called Mr. Gettelfinger’s decision to request assistance for Detroit, along with directors “a big disappointment.” Mr. Hanscom added, “It looks like he is championing more for its own corporate membership.”

But others seem resigned. Brian Fredline, president of Local 602 in Lansing, said: “I think nothing is impossible. I hope that companies will not touch too much of him.”