Debating a Labor Contract on Facebook

DETROIT — As Ford’s 41,000 hourly workers weigh the merits of their proposed four-year contract in plants and union halls across the United States this week, their debates have spilled onto Facebook, providing a glimpse into which issues are influencing their votes most.

For the first time, the United Automobile Workers union has been using social media to communicate with its members during the contract talks in Detroit, and the most intense back-and-forth has occurred in the last few days, as ratification voting got under way at Ford.

Some bemoaned the lack of a wage increase while Ford’s two top executives got bonuses totaling about $100 million. Others criticized the continuation of a two-tier wage scale.

Even those who said they supported the deal acknowledged being unhappy with many portions of it. Some suggested the deal would be much better received if it covered just two years instead of four, so the terms could be revisited sooner.

One of the union staff members who administer the “U.A.W. Ford Department” page and worked closely with the bargaining team during talks, conceded that the agreement was less than ideal but argued that circumstances did not allow for anything better.

“In 2015 we will do better,” the post said. “This is not the last agreement we will ever settle and hopefully our economy, our image, and our ability to bargain with a bigger stick will be better in the future. But this is not the time to wage this war.”

As it became apparent that more workers were voting “no,” talk turned to the possibility of a strike as soon as next week.

A man who identified himself as working in the body shop of Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, said the mood had become “somber and quiet” there.

A few workers noted that Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, was an executive at Boeing during a 69-day strike in 1995, saying that the deal that workers at that company eventually approved was worse than the one they rejected to begin the walkout.

A Ford worker in Louisville expressed concern that any gains made by a strike against Ford would be overshadowed by wages lost while on the picket lines. The U.A.W. pays its members $200 a week for strike duty, roughly one-fifth of full wages.

The U.A.W. had posted updates to Facebook on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings indicating that early voting was around 50-50.

A Challenge for Unions in Public Opinion

A new Gallup poll has found that a slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, approve of labor unions and that the difference in views between how Democrats and Republicans feel toward unions has reached record levels.

The Gallup poll, released on Thursday, found that the approval rate for unions was unchanged from 2010 and was up from 2009, when unions had the lowest approval rating, 48 percent, since Gallup began this survey in 1936.

Showing a huge partisan difference in views, the poll of 1,008 adults found that 78 percent of Democrats approve of unions, while just 26 percent of Republicans do, the lowest percentage ever for Republicans.

Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup’s managing editor, wrote, “This could reflect a greater politicization of union issues given the fact that many state-level efforts to curb union influence were promoted by Republican governors often backed by a Republican-controlled legislature.”

After Republicans swept to power in many states last November, the Republican governors of several states, most notably Wisconsin and Ohio, moved to curb collective bargaining by public-employee unions, an effort that generated huge resistance from labor unions and Democrats.

Mr. Jones wrote that the huge debate over union rights this year “seems to have resulted in a draw in the court of public opinion, with labor unions neither gaining nor losing Americans’ support overall compared with last year.”

The Gallup poll found a strong rebound of Democrats’ and independents’ views toward unions over the last two years. Approval among Democrats rose to 78 percent from 66 percent in 2009, and to 52 percent from 44 percent among independents. For Republicans, the approval rating was 26 percent this year, down from 34 percent last year (and 29 percent in 2009).

This year’s poll found that 52 percent of Americans approved of unions and 42 percent disapproved. (The survey was conducted Aug. 11 to 14 with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.)

When the overall approval rating for unions fell to its lowest level ever in 2009, many labor relations said that was because many Americans believed that labor unions could be too stubborn and demanding and were a major cause of the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies that year. Union leaders maintain that a major reason for the overall decline in approval ratings in recent years — the approval rate was 65 percent less than a decade ago — is that conservative politicians and think tanks have been putting out a flood of negative information about organized labor.

Business groups say labor’s approval ratings have slid from decades past because many Americans feel they have good wages and benefits and no longer see a need for unions.

Labor leaders acknowledge that one of their biggest challenges is to figure out how to make Americans more enthusiastic about unions and unionizing at a time when many workers face stagnating wages, rising insecurity on the job and employers’ cutting back on pensions and other benefits — all while corporate profits have been quite strong.