One week before the sale announcement, Nexteer's workers approved a new union contract.
From the Detroit Free Press:
The contract includes a $5,000 payment to workers in exchange for rolling back a recent 3.7% raise to hourly wages. It also includes voluntary buydowns for production workers. Those payments range from $7,500-$40,000 for workers who agree to take wage cuts to between $12 and $14.50, depending on the job.
In June, Nexteer's workers had rejected a similar contract, after which G.M. announced "that it might wind down the operation if a buyer was not found." But once workers agreed to the "buydowns," G.M. suddenly found a buyer anyway. Was getting wages down a prerequisite to the Chinese deal?
One commenter to a Saginaw News story on the Nexteer labor negotiations, a month before the Chinese sale announcement, expressed the belief that "Chinese factory workers are about to ignite a labor movement the likes of which the world has never seen." For the sake of Saginaw's workers, I sure hope so. But in China, Honda settled its labor unrest by raising the starting salary of a new worker 24 percent, to about $280 a month. Taking national purchasing power disparities into consideration, such wages can't be directly compared to $12 an hour for a Nexteer worker in Saginaw, but it sure seems like there's still quite a ways to go before a Chinese labor movement takes the heat off of Michigan.
Source: http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2010/07/08/gm_nexteer_china/index.html 
