GM workers at Arlington plant vote in favor of labor deal

General Motors (GM) workers at the automaker's largest US factory in Arlington, Texas have voted in majority favor of the tentative labor contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

Yahoo Finance Autos Correspondent Pras Subramanian reports on how this could sway votes on whether to ratify the labor deal from other plants.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video transcript

[AUDIO LOGO] AKIKO FUJITA: Workers at General Motors largest US factory in Arlington, Texas have voted in favor of the tentative contract as voting procedures between the United Auto Workers Union and the big three companies continue.

Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian to give us the details.

Pras, where does this put things in terms of carmakers being able to put the strike all behind them?

PRAS SUMBRAMANIAN: Well, for GM at least it seems there is some positivity.

They're on track for ratification.

You mentioned that big plant in Arlington, Texas.

They voted to approve the deal.

So GM looking at now on a 54% approval vote as of the moment.

There's a couple of plants that are not included in that, including the UAW vote tracker.

There's a plant in Lansing Delta Township where they actually voted against the proposal.

And they did not add those numbers yet to the actual tabulation, and also a few GM parts and distribution centers are not yet fully in there yet from a vote point of view.

But it seems like it won't be enough to overturn.

For GM nearly 32,000 workers have voted out of a possible 47,000 total GM UAW members.

So today's 4:00 PM deadline is looming here for-- that's the looming deadline for the vote.

We're not necessarily going to know all the results until probably later tonight or maybe tomorrow.

But as of-- at the moment right now, GM is sort of OK from an approval of the UAW tentative deal.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And Pras, after all it took to get here, what would happen if the overall vote is a no?

PRAS SUMBRAMANIAN: Right.

So it requires-- it doesn't go plant by plant.

It's got to be an overall vote of the entire UAW membership for a manufacturer.

If they vote a simple majority no, then what happens is that the leadership has to decide what are we going to do, are we going to try to amend the pattern agreement, are we going to try to do another vote, are we going to go on strike again and try to actually extract more concessions that possibly the workers want.

We saw with Mack Trucks they actually reject the deal, went on strike after about 30 days, and now they actually approved it.

So that's a possibility.

But that would be a very huge negative for GM and the industry.

And I think everyone's trying to on both sides, the UAW leadership and GM leadership, they want to make sure this passes.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: We'll certainly be watching that closely at 4:00 today.

Thank you to our very own Pras Subramanian there.