Tentative deal with Ford is approvedDETROIT — The United Auto Workers’ proposed contract with Ford Motor Co. — approved Monday by local union leaders — is the richest of the Detroit Three, with a promise of $10,250 in bonuses for most workers this year alone.The union released details of the agreement Monday. Workers must now vote to ratify it. The four-year deal covers 53,000 workers at 22 U.S. plants.The Ford deal was reached as General Motors Co. workers await word on the fate of their own contract. The UAW said Friday that 55.4 percent of GM workers overall voted in favor of the deal, including 58 percent of production workers. But almost 60 percent of skilled trades workers voted no.The union is now meeting with those workers to find out why they rejected the deal. The discussions could lead to changes in the parts of the contract that affect those workers.Fiat Chrysler workers approved their new contract late last month after rejecting their first offer.Like agreements at GM and Fiat Chrysler, Ford’s deal would eliminate the two-tier wage system the union agreed to in 2007 when the companies were near bankruptcy.Ford currently pays recent hires around $15.78 per hour. Under the new agreement, workers with four or more years of experience will make the top $29 hourly wage within four years; workers with less experience would make between $22.50 and $28 in four years and top wages in eight years. Top-tier workers also would get their first raises in a decade.But the union looked for even more from Ford, which made more money than GM or Fiat Chrysler last year and reported a record North American pretax profit of $2.7 billion in the third quarter.“It is one of the richest agreements in the history of UAW-Ford,” the UAW’s chief Ford negotiator, Jimmy Settles, said last week.

No source found for E. coli at ChipotleSEATTLE — Washington state health officials say they have found no source for the E. coli outbreak related to Chipotle, and the chain’s Pacific Northwest restaurants could reopen later this week.All the tests of food from Chipotle stores in Washington and Oregon came back negative for E. coli, Washington state epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist said. Chipotle did its own testing, and those results came back negative as well.The Chipotle restaurants in Washington and Oregon will be allowed to reopen after they have met some conditions. They must replace all produce, do a deep cleaning of their stores, pass a health inspection and start a new protocol for cleaning produce.Chipotle also has voluntarily decided to start doing some testing of its own of fresh food coming into its restaurants.Lindquist said that he expects Chipotle will reopen the 43 restaurants it closed in Washington and Oregon by Wednesday or Thursday. The company is still finishing its own tests, and it does not plan to get ready to reopen until those tests are completed, he added.About 40 people in the Northwest have gotten E. coli in the outbreak associated with Chipotle. In Washington, the most recent person sickened by E. coli reported eating at Chipotle Oct. 24.