Business Notes LABOR

The outcome was as unexpected as it was speedy. When General Motors and the United Auto Workers began negotiating in late September, it seemed that only a prolonged strike could force GM to agree to a new three-year pact that would satisfy the union. But last week, after just eight days of formal meetings, the largest U.S. automaker and the union representing 335,000 GM workers came to terms.

Sources close to the talks said the GM pact closely parallels the one that the U.A.W. and Ford reached in September. That contract gave Ford workers a 3% wage hike in the first year, along with 3% lump-sum payments in both the second and third years. Far more important to the U.A.W. was the issue of job security. The Ford deal imposed a moratorium on plant closings and barred layoffs for any reason other than a severe sales slump. From GM, the U.A.W. apparently received similar assurances about future employment levels, but in an important concession, the union will allow GM to proceed with already announced plans to close 16 plants, idling 36,000 employees, or 10% of the company's blue-collar work force, by 1989. Even the U.A.W. must have recognized that slumping GM could not afford to provide as much job security as surging Ford, which last year earned more money than its archrival for the first time in 62 years.