Terms of the agreement were not announced. The deal came after three months of negotiations and a final 53-hour weekend of talks. It was announced 42 hours after the current three-year pact expired at midnight Saturday.
"Sometimes it takes a little longer," UAW President Stephen Yokich told a news conference after shaking hands with Ford Chair and CEO Alex Trotman, who praised the negotiations and the UAW bargaining team.
"I think it's been a very good, pragmatic-driven process," Trotman said. "While every minute hasn't been total fun, I have been very impressed by the pragmatism and professionalism and businesslike behavior of the people on the other side of the table."
The member ratification vote should be held by Sept. 29, said Ernie Lofton, a vice president in charge of the UAW's Ford department.
The union's executive committee is scheduled to meet today to approve the deal and the union's Ford council, which would involve several hundred people, will meet tomorrow to review it.
The UAW next will negotiate with either Chrysler Corp. or General Motors Corp. The union has been holding lower-level talks with the two automakers since it designated Ford the lead company earlier this month.
Talks to replace the current three-year contracts began in June under the direction of Yokich, who assumed the union's top post in 1995.
The union's top priority was stemming "outsourcing," or farming out parts jobs to outside, nonunion suppliers. The union sought reduced overtime and protection of the UAW's fully paid health-care benefits.
Outsourcing was at the center of a 17-day strike at two GM parts plants in Dayton, Ohio, last spring which virtually shut down the No. 1 automaker's domestic production.
Any major restrictions on outsourcing in the Ford contract are likely to be fought by GM, which manufactures more parts than Ford or Chrysler.
The UAW's chief concern has been to stop the decline in its membership, which has fallen by nearly one-fifth since the mid-1980s. Nearly 400,000 of its members work for the Big Three.
The negotiations broke from tradition in several ways. Talks started earlier, and Yokich opted not to announce Ford as the official target company, referring to it instead as the "lead company."
He also insisted on not using the term "pattern bargaining," which refers to the UAW tradition of reaching an agreement with one company and then forcing the other two to accept the same deal.
The symbolic changes in wording and the lack of public rhetoric - Yokich imposed unprecedented secrecy on the talks - were intended to signal that the UAW was open to changes and new ways of doing things.