Iacocca to Seek Cheaper UAW Accord

With the focus of auto union talks shifting to Chrysler Corp., Chairman Lee A. Iacocca plans to argue that his company can’t afford to be as generous with its workers as Ford and GM.

But United Auto Workers officials said Tuesday that his pleadings will fall on deaf ears.

“Any time he (Iacocca) makes as much as he has in the last five years, it’s pretty hard for him to plead poverty,” UAW Vice President Stan Marshall said. Iacocca has earned more than $6.4 million since 1985 in salary and bonuses. Stock options have added millions more.

But Chrysler spokesman Lee Sechler said: “He (Iacocca) is going to explain we have specific needs, and we want to talk to the union about it.”

The three-year pacts with Ford and General Motors provide income guarantees for workers laid off due to sales reductions, penalties of up to $5 an hour for scheduling excessive overtime and a 3% raise in base wages during the first year of the contract, coupled with 3% lump-sum payments in the second and third years.

Perhaps most onerous to Chrysler is what is absent from the agreements with Ford and GM: changes in health-care provisions.

From the first day of bargaining in mid-July, Chrysler has said it needs relief from soaring medical care costs, which reached about $684 million in 1989.

The company proposed a multi-employer health-care program to cut costs, but the UAW’s Marshall said that suggestion is all but dead.

“The company could be in much better shape if those (Chrysler) executives would stop running around with all that money,” said Marshall, who heads the union’s Chrysler bargaining team.