With Ford, General Motors and Chrysler also due to report second-quarter profits this week, some UAW members may see this as a time to push for a bigger pay package and win back past concessions.

That would be returning to the formula that helped bring domestic auto makers to the brink of disaster, requiring a bailout of GM and Chrysler that cost taxpayers $14 billion never to be recovered. Only Ford toughed out the crisis without following its rivals into bankruptcy.

Now that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are making money again, workers want compensation for their sacrifice. Just how much they get is the central question hanging over contract talks that start this week between Detroit and one of the nation’s largest and most powerful unions.

The negotiations, the first since Chrysler and GM took government aid and emerged from bankruptcy, will set wages and benefits for 111,000 members of the United Auto Workers, including those at Ford, which avoided bankruptcy by taking out massive private loans. The UAW’s four-year contracts with the Detroit Three expire on Sept. 14.

In the four years since the two sides last negotiated a labor contract, the Detroit automakers were pushed into crisis by collapsing vehicle demand and the financial convulsion of 2008. Both General Motors Co and Chrysler, now majority-owned by Italy’s Fiat SpA, were bailed out by the Obama administration.

Chrysler and the union would prefer to avoid arbitration as that process would increase the chance for an imposed settlement that neither side finds palatable.

“We’re focused on moving all three corporations (forward),” UAW President Bob King said today during an opening ceremony for negotiations with Chrysler Group LLC at the automaker’s Auburn Hills headquarters.

King, who would not speak about specific negotiating terms, said the UAW is not only committed to helping its members, but rebuilding America’s middle class.

The post-recession financial picture painted by those results should play a big role in shaping the background of the talks, which open today with Chrysler, Wednesday at General Motors and Friday at Ford.

The Detroit Three are likely to report combined profits of more than $4 billion, before one-time charges, despite the challenging economic backdrop of the last three months.

All the rules are different. The feds pushed General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC through bankruptcy, rescuing the union and two of its major employers from certain collapse. Add Ford Motor Co.’s bootstrap restructuring, and a Detroit auto industry given up for dead should be reset for long-term success. In theory, anyway.

“They’re not that far removed from catastrophe,” says Arthur Schwartz, president of Labor and Economics Associates and a retired GM bargainer. “You have so many different sets of expectations going in.” Some of them could be irreconcilable.

An unusual nexus of German labor rules and U.S. law has raised union officials’ hopes in a region that has long resisted their overtures. The United Auto Workers union and labor officials at Volkswagen in Wolfsburg last week held talks about VW labor efforts to establish a German-style system of worker representation at the Tennessee plant.

If it happens, it could open the door to an as-yet undefined relationship between the group and …

A 16-year veteran of Ford Motor Co., Mr. Boyd works on the assembly line at the auto maker’s plant here, which cranks out cars just eight hours a day. The rest of the time it’s idle.

In the contract talks, Mr. Boyd would like to come away with higher wages but he thinks it is even more important for the UAW to persuade Ford to make more cars in …