Analysts see auto industry slowing dramatically.(Chicago Tribune)

As automakers prepare to announce gloomy September sales results Tuesday, Wall Street analysts and industry forecasters are predicting even worse times ahead in the fourth quarter and 2002, when new vehicle sales could fall a million units or more and thousands of workers could lose their jobs.

Even as the U.S. economy began to slow, car and light truck sales were down only 5 percent through August, to an annual rate of 16.5 million units, which still had the industry on target for its third best year ever. But amid the all-important rollout of new 2002 models, showroom traffic largely evaporated after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and, despite a pickup from a rash of cut-rate financing deals, has not returned to normal levels.

Sean McAlinden, a labor economist for the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., sees 90,000 jobs _ almost 10 percent _ disappearing from the auto industry, including vehicle manufacturers and major suppliers, by year-end.

The auto industry operates on a boom-and-bust cycle, McAlinden said, but _ unlike the plant closings and massive job cuts of the 1980s and early `90s _ this time the cuts will fall heaviest on white-collar workers. When sales were climbing and profits soaring, the Big Three automakers agreed to contracts with the United Auto Workers that guarantee laid-off assembly line workers 95 percent of their base salary for 40 weeks and then full pay.

"You can idle a plant for a week or two and lay off UAW workers, but it doesn't save any money. They're trying to trim union employment through a natural attrition rate," McAlinden said.

Ford Motor Co. cut more than 5,000 white-collar jobs this year, and McAlinden expects another 5,000 by the end of December. When General Motors Corp. announced more than 9,000 job cuts in December, nearly 7,000 were white-collar positions, and DaimlerChrysler's massive 26,000-worker job cut announcement in January included almost 7,000 salaried jobs and many at overseas plants.

McAlinden estimates the U.S. auto industry employed 928,000 in August, down from 1.05 million a year earlier.