NEWS & LETTERS, July-August 2010
UAW election and battles to come
Detroit -- As Bob King was elected president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) on June 16, the divide between the union and its leadership has never been greater than it is today. Douglas Fraser opened the floodgates of concessions in 1979 by volunteering cuts in workers' pay and benefits to "save" Chrysler from what was called "impending bankruptcy" by then Chrysler president and flim-flam artist Lee Iacocca. Chrysler workers to this day have not recovered what they lost.
Every UAW president since has agreed to an unending series of concessions. Beginning in 2005 outgoing president Ron Gettelfinger did more than any of his predecessors to promote the fantasy that "we, the members and the companies, are in this together." As one GM worker who had been laid off noted, "I've never seen a GM executive on that assembly line."
The 2005-09 contract was scrapped in 2007 for another concessionary four-year agreement, which was again changed in 2009 -- this time the concessions were called "contract modifications." Concessions cut starting wages for new workers from $28 to $14 an hour, eliminated retiree healthcare and pension benefits for new workers, and assessed higher healthcare premiums.
The UAW assumed healthcare liabilities of retirees totaling $88 billion in a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) trust fund. Other concessions eliminated job banks for laid-off workers, reduced overtime, gave up holiday and vacation payments, suspended cost-of-living increases altogether as well as performance bonuses and gave up lump sum bonuses agreed to in 2007. The loss to each worker has been from $7,000 to $30,000 a year.
In addition, as a result of GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, wages were frozen for entry-level workers, a no-strike clause until 2015 was accepted, vision and dental care were not offered, and skilled trades classifications were reduced, meaning more speed-up.
But King had aggressively supported these concessions and also tried to convince Ford workers to accept them. Instead, Ford workers, by a 70% vote, rejected them.
In 1970 King had gone to work at the huge Ford Rouge plant, and in 1984 was elected president of Ford Local 600. He began the tried-and-true path into the UAW bureaucracy by becoming a militant and vocal opposition to the union leadership. This thorn in the side of the union was pulled out in the predictable way: in 1989 he was appointed to a regional directorship, and in 1998 was elevated to a UAW vice presidency in charge of national organizing and the UAW's Ford Department.
In this year's election, for the first time since 1992, there was a real opposition candidate. Gary Walkowski, a dissident committeeman from Local 600, strongly opposed the concessions that King supported. While no one expected Walkowski to win, this organized opposition indicates the mood of rank-and-file workers who are seething over the concessions that resulted in hundreds of thousands of laid off auto workers and increasingly dehumanized conditions of work on the production line.
King is 63 years old and will serve only one four-year term, since the UAW constitution requires retirement at 65. While he says his top priority is to restore the concessions lost since 2005, some present attitudes he displays raise many questions.
He is a firm believer in cooperating with auto management, which has consistently resulted in worsening conditions for workers. He points with pride to an auto supplier plant in Indiana, whose management demanded $3 million in concessions but permitted the union to study production in the plant. The UAW team recommended changes that saved the company $9 million and cancelled the concessions. There is no mention of whether the changes improved or worsened the worker's conditions.
The present state of the union does not lead to optimism. Membership has drastically declined, plummeting from over 1.5 million in 1970 to 392,000 today, the lowest number in 70 years, with more than a quarter of that number not involved in auto production. The union's treasury has also nose-dived -- from $69 million to $1.2 million.
The present auto contract expires in 2011, King's only chance to improve autoworkers' conditions. But the situation has changed drastically in that the UAW now owns more than half of Chrysler and a big chunk of GM resulting from the bankruptcies. King will obviously have to consider the UAW's stake in the companies, and all indications are that his focus will be on the corporate bottom line -- the UAW's as well as the companies'. As many auto workers are now saying, the UAW is the company. This does not bode well for the future welfare of rank-and-file auto workers.
-- Andy Phillips
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