Ron Gettelfinger, UAW's Pres, talked tough last year, banging his fist on the podium at the annual meeting and shouting "No More Concessions!" Almost as soon at that conference was over, Gettelfinger negotiated a series of sweeping concessions at Chrysler and GM which did not prevent the threat of bankruptcy mostly because the amount of workers' wages had nothing whatever to do with the long series of bad management decisions that killed sales along with the worsening economy.
Ford was the only car company that rejected govt help, and it did so in the expectation that it would be able to get major concessions from Gettelfinger. Which it did. That's not the problem. The problem is that Ford is bragging about its sales on the one hand while demanding Gettelfinger's major givebacks on the other, and the union members have had enough bullshit thrown at them from both "sides". They look like they might just turn down Gettelfinger's management-friendly contract.
Members of at least five local chapters of the United Automobile Workers union have turned down the proposed changes, which include a six-year wage freeze for newly hired workers, some job-classification changes and a provision that bars the union from striking over demands for better pay and benefits through 2015.
Ford, the only one of the three Detroit automakers to avoid bankruptcy this year, says it needs the modifications to remain competitive with General Motors and Chrysler, whose workers agreed to similar deals in the spring. Compared to its crosstown rivals, Ford has been surging.
Only about a third of the locals representing Ford’s 41,000 union workers had finished voting by Tuesday, but already the potential for successful ratification was diminishing unless U.A.W. leaders could quickly contain growing opposition among rank-and-file members.
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“The workers are essentially saying enough is enough, that they don’t see enough of a case for further concessions,” Mr. Chaison said [Gary N. Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass]. “Ford had been making a case that it was doing better than General Motors and Chrysler, and as a result they have painted themselves into a corner, claiming that they were turning around but at the same time trying to claim that they needed major concessions to turn around.”
IOW, they lied like a rug and got caught. See, one of the reasons corpo's insist on keeping their profit statements secret from anyone who isn't an investor is so they can brag about how much money they're making when someone wants to invest while crying about how poor they are when workers come looking for raises. In Corporate America there are always Bad Times on when union contract negotiating time comes around but Whoopee Times when they're reporting (secret) profits which affect investment pay-outs and, of course, CEO salaries & bonuses.
So it's not like Ford is doing anything new. This is standard horse-trading: when you're the buyer you tell the seller that his horse is spavined, his back is swayed, he's got thrush in his hooves, and you suspect he's 12 years old, not 3. That keeps down the price you have to pay for the horse. But when you're selling, you tell the prospective buyer that the horse is at the peak of condition, hasn't been sick a day in his life, ran the mile in 10 secs just yesterday, and that you've got 4 other buyers panting in the wings. It's all lies on both ends but it's expected.
What should NOT be expected is for the buyer to swallow every lie, to be so gullible that the pulled-over-wool covers him from his head to his toe insytead of just his eyes. And, of course, Gettelfinger probably wasn't that gullible. When a union leader negotiates a sweetheart contract with corporate management, there's usually a reason. Like, $$$ or prestige. But whatever the reason, the members are clearly not buying Gettelfinger's spirited defense of management's plaintive cry of poverty. They know better.
This looks a little like what happened when the original UAW jumped the AF of L in 1935 because its president, William Green, a good friend of Henry Ford's and, like him, a rabid anti-Red, refused to honor their demands and suspended them because he was afraid doing any less would make him look sympathetic to socialism in the eyes of the owners.
That's an admitted oversimplification but the point is valid: the UAW has consistently gone along with auto managements' demands for concessions for the past 30 years, and in times that were considerbly better than the Great Depression, and never pushed to get any of those concessions undone when even the companies could no longer hide their obscene profits.
Gettelfinger's "go along to get along" strategy has been a clear failure, just as Green's was. The companies' managements have used and abused the UAW's soft, "reasonable" approach in exactly the way one would expect and gotten concessions they never should have gotten, probably because Gettelfinger was afraid of being called a "labor radical" in just the same way Green was. Perhaps he was trying to prove he could be understanding of management's very real problems and a realistic partner in solving them. But as John L Lewis proved in the depths of the Great Depression, that way lies madness. And the loss of your membership.
The UAW won major concessions from the auto makers in 1937, including higher wage levels and benefit packages, and all the employee rights that Green had insisted were impossible in a collapsed economy. Present-day UAW members have apparently gotten tired of the weakass surrender of their union leaders, tired of the way they threaten, just like the companies, that if the union doesn't take more cuts (and more and more and more) the auto makers will go out of business. It wasn't true in the Great Depression and it isn't true in the Bush Depression. And the consistent rounds of concessions since the 80's didn't save the companies from their own managements' boneheaded mistakes, either. If Gettelfinger doesn't get that, he may soon become as irrelevant as Green was.
Maybe SEIU like to stretch itself into the automotive field? Sounds like there are a lot of very unhappy UAW members looking for better representation. We used to call that an "opportunity".
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