THE MAJOR PLAYERS IN COMING AUTO NEGOTIATIONS : At Ford

For management: Stanley J. Surma, 60, executive director of labor relations and employee development for Ford.

Surma joined Ford in 1952 and has served in a number of industrial relations positions at the company. Surma was chairman of the Ford national negotiating committee for the 1984 Ford-UAW labor contract talks. He will serve in that capacity for the 1987 negotiations. This will be his first time at the center of the limelight, however. Until this year, Ford Vice President Peter Pestillo handled all media interviews and much of the key contract bargaining.

For labor: Steven P. Yokich, 52, vice president of the United Auto Workers and director of the UAW’s Ford Department.

Yokich started working as a tool and die apprentice at a Heidrich plant in Oak Park, Mich., and was elected shop chair, local union representative, and a vice president of UAW Local 155. Yokich took over as director of the Ford Department in 1983, and was in charge of the UAW’s negotiations with Ford in 1984. A close ally of UAW President Owen Bieber and widely viewed as Bieber’s heir apparent, Yokich has also been handed a number of other plum assignments to go along with the Ford Department--he runs the union’s Skilled Trades Department, its Michigan Community Action Program (the union’s political arm in its home state), and the Technical Office and Professional Department, a growing division that serves many of the UAW’s members who don’t work on the assembly line.

At General Motors

For management: Alfred S. Warren Jr., 61, General Motors vice president for industrial relations.

Warren joined the General Motors Institute, a GM-sponsored college in Flint, Mich., in 1955 as a conference leader. He was named general director of personnel for the Fisher Body Division in May, 1977. One of the early pioneers in employee involvement and quality of work life programs inside GM, Warren took over the industrial relations department in 1980, when GM decided that it wanted to move away from its traditional adversarial approach to contract talks. Warren has admitted that he made a number of serious mistakes during his first round of contract talks as the company’s chief negotiator in the midst of the recession in 1982, but since has seemingly gained greater confidence.

For Labor: Donald F. Ephlin, 62, vice president of the United Auto Workers and director of the UAW’s General Motors Department.

Ephlin started as an hourly worker at a General Motors assembly plant in Framingham, Mass, where he became active in UAW Local 422. From 1970 to 1977, Ephlin served as administrative assistant to then-UAW President Leonard Woodcock and participated in the 1973 and 1976 national negotiations with GM, Ford and Chrysler. In June, 1980, Ephlin was elected a union vice president and was put in charge of the Ford Department. In 1983, he lost out to Owen Bieber, then director of the GM Department, in a bid for the UAW presidency. Ephlin subsequently replaced Bieber as director of the GM Department and was reelected in 1986. His views on the need to compromise with management still often clash with those of Bieber and many other of the UAW’s more traditional leaders, and he is widely considered to be politically isolated within the union’s hierarchy.