Teamsters Car Haulers Launch Nationwide Strike
Picket lines went up from Los Angeles to Boston on Friday as 20,000 Teamsters Union car haulers launched a strike, and auto industry officials said the walkout could hurt car sales unless a settlement is reached quickly.
In Los Angeles and elsewhere, the effects of the strike were limited somewhat by previously scheduled auto-plant shutdowns for the new model year. But company officials said dealers will experience severe shortages if the strike lasts very long. The truckers haul new cars from assembly plants to dealerscountry.
“Their timing wasn’t what you call swift,” commented a General Motors executive in Van Nuys, where GM’s assembly plant closed at the end of Friday’s shift until Aug. 26. At most, a day’s worth of production of Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds would go undelivered.
GM workers entering the Van Nuys plant didn’t encounter the pickets at the rear of the plant, a GM spokesman said, and production wasn’t affected. Trucking supervisors loaded the finished cars onto the rigs. But they presumably won’t go anywhere until the strike ends.
Workers, who said companies had forced the strike by offering a contract with unacceptable job security and mileage pay provisions, also walked picket lines in Detroit and Flint, Mich.; Kansas City, Mo.; Oklahoma City; Shreveport, La.; Birmingham, Ala.; Boston; Dallas; Newark, N.J.; Baltimore; Phoenix; Oakland, and other cities.
Contract talks broke down Thursday, and the drivers, maintenance and warehouse workers walked out at midnight in the first national strike ever by the Teamsters car haulers, who first negotiated a national contract in 1967.
The Teamsters’ general executive board sanctioned the strike after union Vice President Walter Shea announced that the union had received “a totally unacceptable proposal” from negotiators for the employers.
The action by Teamsters officials came in the face of rank-and-file unrest over an earlier tentative pact that Shea and the remainder of the union’s brass had recommended for ratification as the best deal available. However, the drivers overwhelmingly voted down that pact, setting up new talks.
Average Pay $13 an Hour
The car hauling firms, which have made profits in an otherwise depressed trucking industry, negotiate as a group. Their two largest members are Ryder Systems and Leaseway Transportation, which reportedly employ about half of those involved.
Hourly pay for the car haulers averages about $13. The earlier contract rejected by the membership included a 60-cent-an-hour raise in each of three years of the agreement. Most drivers earn 65 cents a mile while delivering cars and would have received a raise each year of 3.5 cents per loaded mile.
But the earlier tentative contract also would have cut the mileage rate in half for return trips, would have included lower wages for newly hired employees and would have reduced cost-of-living allowances.
The officers of Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, the home local of former Teamsters presidents Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Fitzsimmons, had urged their members to reject the contract despite its support from national Teamsters leaders. Local 299 includes about 3,000 car haulers, the largest such bloc of any local in the country.
The rejection, announced July 12, was a victory for Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a Detroit-based dissident group of 8,000 Teamsters that says it is trying to reform the union.
“The money is not the critical issue here,” said Jim Carothers, national chairman of Teamsters for a Democratic Union’s Car Haul Coordinating Committee, who walked a picket line in Dearborn, Mich.
He said the companies were calling for “a tremendous decrease in working conditions,” criticizing a management proposal to hire new drivers at lower pay as “an excuse to fire senior drivers and replace them with people they only have to pay 80% of a wage to.”
Output May Be Affected
A management proposal to reduce backhaul mileage rates would cut drivers’ pay by 20% to 25%, he said. “I feel there’s something inherently wrong with this when these companies are making huge profits,” Carothers said.
“If the strike lasts more than a matter of a few days, auto production will certainly be affected,” said Ian Hunter, executive director for the National Automobile Transporters Labor Division, the trucking industry bargaining group.
