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General Motors Co. employees near Nashville, Tenn., narrowly rejected a proposed contract with the United Auto Workers, an early indication that the union’s vote to end a more than five-week strike could be a close call.

General Motors Co. and the United Auto Workers have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract, and the union will decide Oct. 17 whether to continue a more than monthlong strike while the deal is voted on by members.

General Motors Co. Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra is meeting with United Auto Workers leaders at the main bargaining table Oct. 15 as the two sides inch closer to a tentative agreement that could end a strike now in its fifth week.

Many former Lordstown assembly plant workers now spread across GM factories in seven states were hoping that the automaker would agree during contract talks to revive production that ended in March and rescue their old jobs. But that hope is dwindling.

DETROIT — General Motors now says striking workers will get company-paid health insurance, nine days after telling the union that coverage would be cut off.

Union leaders from General Motors Co. factories across the country are flying into Detroit this weekend to either agree to take a proposed labor contract offered by the automaker to their members for a vote, or go on strike.

General Motors Co. wants to hire more temporary workers at U.S. plants and trim its health care costs, said people familiar with the automaker’s thinking. Its union — still steaming over the carmaker’s plans to close four U.S. factories — has little interest in obliging.

General Motors CEO Mary Barra said June 5 that the company still hopes to sell its Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant to Workhorse Group, an electric-vehicle start-up, although questions have been raised about that company’s financial wherewithal.

General Motors Co. is making a big claim about its future electric cars: The automaker will be able to sell them at “very average transaction prices” and be profitable, GM President Mark Reuss said in a presentation June 5.

The president of United Auto Workers Local 1112 in Lordstown — whom Trump attacked on Twitter two months ago — is among a handful of workers whose job is to do maintenance at the inactive compact car factory that made its last Chevrolet Cruze in March. He was left in the dark about GM’s talks to sell the factory.