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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2007
UAW settles with GM
Detroit--Negotiators for General Motors and the United Auto Workers reached a settlement on Sept. 26 after a two-day strike. The reason that UAW president Ron Gettelfinger gave for the brief strike was a demand for guarantees on preservation of jobs in the face of GM’s open plans to move more production outside the country. But the settlement was all about ridding GM of health care burdens.
Negotiations between the UAW union and GM had centered on VEBA (voluntary employee benefit association), a plan to transfer employee health care benefits from the company to the union. Dumping GM’s obligations on the UAW will transform contract benefit bargaining for every union and will ultimately affect every single individual in this country.
The plan is so complex that the company and union negotiated for the longest time in 25 years, and involved accountants, lawyers, economists, benefit specialists, and health care experts.
What is of great concern to the rank-and-file auto workers is what the trade-offs will be. They know the two-tier wage plan will permit paying new employees less in wages and benefits. At the same time two-tier wages create tensions between new and older workers because it violates the long-held union principle of equal pay for equal work.
Other troublesome concerns are work rules and flexibility, which mean working conditions in the plant that workers will face every day. They know that every change that has been made resulted in more speed-up, more inhuman working conditions and the creation of fear among the workers, fear for the loss of a job or a whole plant.
While the out-sourcing of jobs and plants has been going on for years, and while concessions keep piling up because UAW President Gettelfinger and his labor bureaucrats cooperate to satisfy the company instead of the rank and file, the separation of the union leaders from the workers has never been greater.
What auto workers have learned the hard way is that if the company is for something, they had better be against it. That is why they are very worried about the negotiations, and know only too well what Charles Denby, Black Chrysler production worker and founding editor of News and Letters, said: "You never know about a contract until you start working under it. That’s when you learn all the fish hooks in it."
--Labor veteran
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