BFGoodrich Tire Manufacturing and the United Steelworkers of America reached a tentative agreement Friday, the result of more than a week of negotiations that kept a strike at bay.

More than 2,200 workers at plants in Tuscaloosa and Opelika had planned on forming picket lines at midnight on Aug. 11, but the plans were postponed as talks in Pittsburgh continued beyond the strike deadline.

BFGoodrich, a unit of the French company Michelin, was been negotiating with the union to replace expired contracts at the Alabama plants and one each in Canada and Indiana.

"We're pleased to have reached agreements that will provide the framework for making our BFGoodrich Tire Manufacturing plants viable," Dave Lowe, vice president of labor and employee relations of Michelin North America said in a statement. "We've achieved pioneering agreements that help provide some of our oldest plants in North America a fighting chance in today's challenging business environment and a very competitive industry."

In all, the tentative agreements cover about 3,400 USWA-respresented workers in Alabama and in Fort Wayne, Ind., and 1,000 workers in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

Details of the tentative agreements were not disclosed, pending ratification by union members at the four plants.

Alabama's tire and rubber industry has lost more than half its jobs since 1988, to about 5,000.

The state ranked as the top tire-producing state in the country in the 1980s, but mergers, buyouts and consolidations have reduced the industry's payrolls. Last year, Alabama ranked fourth in U.S. tire production.