UAW Torn Between Tradition, Pressures for Fresh Approach : Attitudes Clash on Wage Hikes, Job Security

More than a decade and a half after the Japanese started changing the rules in the American car market, the 1.2-million-member United Auto Workers union is still having trouble facing the future.

Historically a trend setter on collective-bargaining issues for organized labor, the UAW has been agonizingly slow to deal with the import challenge threatening the jobs of its members.

Now, the UAW is on the labor movement’s front lines in trying to wrestle with the most difficult dilemma facing unions in the 1980s--how to find new ways to give job security to workers whose jobs are threatened by cheap labor in the Third World, while at the same time obtaining the traditional wage-and-benefit increases that unionized workers in America have come to expect.

Many industry executives and outside labor analysts believe that the UAW is at a key crossroads in its history, and must choose between two starkly different paths: it must decide whether to moderate its economic demands and agree to greater flexibility in management-labor relations on the shop floor in order to avert a wholesale move offshore by the domestic auto makers, or continue as it always has and face the possibility of becoming a union representing a small number of highly paid workers in a shrinking domestic industry.

Traditionalists in Control

For the moment, observers say, the traditionalists are firmly in control. And, they say, the union’s adherence to a hard-line stance signals a defeat for the union’s leading progressive, UAW Vice President Donald Ephlin, director of the union’s big General Motors department.

It also reflects a victory for the more conventional thinking of UAW President Owen Bieber, the union politician who defeated Ephlin in the crucial 1983 race to name a successor to former UAW President Douglas Fraser, widely regarded as a leading labor figure of the past quarter century.

To some labor specialists in academia, the growing stature of Bieber and the increasing isolation within the union of Ephlin exemplifies organized labor’s general move away from the more accommodating stance it took during the last recession.

And, after nearly 40 years in the union, Ephlin may now be more popular at Harvard and Stanford than inside Solidarity House, the UAW’s Detroit headquarters.

Even though he was Fraser’s personal choice to be his successor (until Fraser counted heads among members of the union’s executive board, which held the key nominating election, and found Ephlin had virtually no support) his views on collective bargaining are unpopular inside the union, where he has been tagged as being too pro-management.

Dealt Serious Blow

His reputation inside the union was also dealt a serious blow in early 1984 when an internal GM document that indicated that the company hoped to manipulate Ephlin to win his support for more accommodating union policies was leaked to the press.

Now, knowledgeable sources say, Ephlin has few, if any, close allies who share his views on the ruling executive board, and the perception inside the UAW, whether fair or not, is that Bieber is tougher on management than Ephlin.

“It’s hard to get too far out in front of the membership, and Ephlin has suffered more than anybody politically because of that,” one high-level staffer says. “He’s tried to be innovative and do some things that could help us avoid getting beat up (by imports) and he’s taken a beating for it.”

Meanwhile, Bieber and many other leaders in the UAW, pointing to the record profits the domestic auto makers have posted since the recession and the huge bonuses being paid to the top auto executives, still refuse to believe that the union has to make bargaining trade-offs between job security and big wage hikes.

They argue that American unions can’t match the low wages paid in South Korea or Taiwan, so the import problem must be dealt with through trade legislation fashioned in Washington, not through contract concessions at the bargaining table in Detroit.

To be sure, Bieber and other union leaders have allowed real progress to take place in labor-management relations on the factory floor. Despite internal pressure, Bieber’s administration has not reduced its commitment

to such things as joint employee-involvement programs, which have been criticized by many local union leaders for reducing the union’s power inside the plants.

But Bieber and his aides remain hesitant to go too far in working with the companies for fear of losing independence to management.

“I don’t think I’m a died-in-the-wool traditionalist, but I’ve also learned over the years to insist that I see something more than just talk from the other side of the table,” Bieber says.

Pressure From Militants

The leadership also doesn’t want to appear too vulnerable to the militants on the union’s left, who yearn for a return to the confrontational style of the 1960s, and who would love to be able to charge the Bieber administration with being soft.

Victor Reuther, for instance, the elderly brother of the union’s revered former president, Walter Reuther, has been touring UAW locals in recent months to help a group of militants drum up opposition to the UAW’s novel, low-cost labor contract with the new Saturn Corp., GM’s last-ditch effort to build small cars in the United States that are cost-competitive with the imports.

Yet observers say Bieber and the rest of the leadership must bear part of the blame for the internal political pressures they now face; the conflicts have developed in part because of their inability, or unwillingness, to communicate the depth of the industry’s long-range competitive problems to the rank-and-file, who as a result have built up artificially high expectations about what the union can wring out of the companies.

“Our people (members) are very responsive when they understand the facts, but we’ve got to do a better job of communicating to them,” Ephlin says.

“There’s a real information and credibility gap between what the membership sees and what’s really out there happening to the industry,” adds Michael Bennett, president of UAW Local 326 in Flint, Mich. “There has been a real failure by the leadership to get information across to the workers about the problems we face.”

So the leadership is under grass-roots pressure to demand large wage increases just as the flood of Asian and European auto imports is reaching high tide.

“They can’t have it both ways any more,” a Big Three labor negotiator says. “They can’t just keep cooking in higher labor costs and then complain when the work goes out of the country.”

Very Different Contracts

That the union appears to have chosen the traditional course became clear in 1985, when the UAW negotiated two very different labor contracts--one, an innovative accord with GM’s Saturn small-car unit and the other, a more conventional agreement with Chrysler--that sharply defined the limits of how far the union would go.

Ephlin was the union’s prime mover behind the Saturn pact, while Bieber was the architect of the Chrysler settlement.

In the Saturn contract, the union displayed a new readiness to experiment and to gamble on closer relations with management in an effort to retain some small-car production in the United States. The contract calls for relatively low base wages, but with extra bonuses tied to profits and productivity, dramatically streamlined union work rules and job classifications, and an unprecedented level of worker participation in decision-making.

But the Chrysler agreement, which came just a few months after the Saturn accord, seemed to signal a return by the union to a more confrontational relationship with management, and is widely viewed--both inside the union and out--as more representative than Saturn of the union leadership’s thinking about the future.

The rich wage settlement at Chrysler, obtained only after a nationwide strike, is expected to set the pattern for contract talks at both GM and Ford in 1987, where similar wage demands are likely to be made.

In the third year of the Chrysler agreement, the UAW won a 3% hike in base wages--the largest such raise granted by an auto maker since 1979--and many union and industry officials say the union could face a showdown next year if it demands 3% increases in all three years of its new contracts with GM and Ford.

“There was some pain and anguish in the union when Owen nailed down the 3% at Chrysler and said this means a return to traditional raises,” one union official says.

Following Tradition

But Bieber believes that, in the bargaining policies set down at Chrysler, he was simply following UAW tradition. He noted that the Chrysler pact “is a plain indication that this is the same union it was 25 years ago . . . and does the same things it did when Walter Reuther was president . . . it bargains the best possible settlement for the members it represents.”

Meanwhile, the union’s top leaders have repeatedly stressed that the Saturn agreement will remain an isolated experiment, and won’t be allowed to become the standard for industrywide bargaining in the future.

“The international executive board (the UAW’s 24-member top administrative body) views (Saturn) as a special situation, and it is not to be viewed as a pattern,” Bieber says. “And the Chrysler agreement certainly underscores that. . . . “

Industry executives, who were initially hopeful that the Saturn pact might lead to greater cooperation across the board, are now more pessimistic about the course the union is following.

“Saturn was the minimum the union would do in order to get new work, while the Chrysler contract is going to be the norm,” predicted one top industry labor relations executive, who asked not to be identified.

Similarly, union leaders say the UAW agreed to other low-cost pacts (with the GM-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, Calif., and Mazda’s first U.S. plant, which will open next year outside Detroit with UAW workers) only because the union had little bargaining leverage in dealing with the new operations.

But while they are allowing such Japanese-affiliated plants to begin domestic production with labor cost advantages over the Big Three, the union’s leaders won’t consider making the same changes for the established plants of the U.S. car companies. Chrysler’s efforts to win Saturn-type, streamlined work rules in its plants were quashed by the union in last year’s talks.

Central Issue

In fact, the issue of how far to let Saturn and other such experiments spread throughout the industry seems to be central to the conflict between Bieber and Ephlin.

“It’s always a matter of gradations of how far to go,” another top union staffer notes. “Bieber has put an emphasis on job security in bargaining, and so has Don, but Bieber’s not willing to give as much as Ephlin is willing to give” to management to get greater job security, the staffer notes.

Still, both inside the union and out, those differences have been big enough to turn Bieber and Ephlin into symbols for two very different ways of looking at the union’s future.

Bieber, the hulking, 6-foot-5 union president, is the archetypical small town boy who made good, an affable union politician from rural Michigan who has successfully trudged his way up through the union’s bureaucracy.

In his first term, which ends this year, Bieber, 56, has carefully navigated the mine fields of union politics by avoiding controversial stands on key issues. Some union insiders argue that Bieber understands the need to balance the union’s conflicting goals, but isn’t clear on how to do so.

“Sometimes I’m not sure he understands how to bring a large organization like the UAW through the changes it has to undergo to retain the most jobs at the highest possible standard of living,” a union insider says. “He knows he has to get from point A to point B, he just doesn’t know how to do it.”

Brusque with the press, Bieber seems to prefer the company of fellow union officials to the academics, consultants and reporters who crowd around Ephlin at the growing number of university symposiums and industry conferences held on campuses and at think tanks each year to debate the future of unions in America.

One reason Bieber has trouble setting long-range policy, some suggest, is that he is something of a nit-picker, a manager who gets bogged down in unimportant matters better left to his lieutenants, and a leader who seems overly cautious and slow about making decisions.

Strong Within Ranks

But Bieber has solidified his position where it counts--in the membership ranks of the union. Since entering office in 1983, he has worked hard to win grass-roots loyalty by touring dozens of plants in the last year, and seems assured of winning reelection for another three-year term at the UAW’s national convention in Anaheim next June.

“Bieber got a real good response from the members in a recent visit here,” says John Coale, president of UAW Local 662, which represents workers at GM’s Delco Remy plant in Anderson, Ind. “He’s a warm person one-on-one.”

Union officials also say that Bieber’s critics in the media haven’t given him enough credit for his political acumen; they argue that he recognizes there isn’t a consensus within the union in support of smaller wage demands, dramatic changes in benefit plans or Saturn-type contracts at older auto plants.

Bieber agrees that he is simply voicing the concerns of the membership--and facing up to the political realities of the union--by rejecting such notions.

“An organization such as this union, which is very democratic--you just can’t pick it up and move it overnight,” Bieber observes.

Ephlin, by contrast, seems to love the limelight. An Irish Catholic from Massachusetts, Ephlin, 60, is more outspoken than Bieber in his calls for change, but often lacks Bieber’s awareness of the union’s political realities.

But to academics and other outside observers, he is widely considered to have one of the best minds in the labor movement; they see him as a progressive who is interested in searching out new ways for industry and labor to work together to compete with imports.

Break With the Past

And Ephlin made it clear in an interview that he believes that the union has to break with its past in order to come to grips with its current problems.

“Part of our problem is due to our success over the years,” he says. “Since World War II, we’ve done very well, and we’ve done many things that the members have come to expect, and that makes it more difficult to get an agreement on a contract that is less rich than previous contracts.”

A one-time personal aide to former UAW President Leonard Woodcock, Ephlin has spoken to countless seminars, represented the union on at least one presidential commission, and is always ready to provide reporters with quotes about the need for change in the old adversarial relationship between management and labor, thus winning favorable press coverage and welcomes on university campuses.

“I’m very confident that Ephlin will be treated very well by history, while Bieber will just go down as another guy,” notes David Cole, director of the Center for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the University of Michigan.

But such outside support has done little to help Ephlin inside Solidarity House. If anything, it has hurt him politically, since his high media profile has lent credence to charges by union critics that he is a prima donna who spends too much time with professors and industry management and not enough time with union members on the shop floor.

“Inside the UAW, Don appears to have been painted as a management man, which is unfair,” says Audrey Freedman, a labor specialist at the Conference Board in New York. “He’s just a moderate, thoughtful man trying to deal with reality, and he’s trying to save the union’s bacon in the most graceful way possible.”

Sensitive to pro-management charges, Ephlin likes to recall that many of the controversial policies he advocates, including enhanced employee involvement programs, profit-sharing, and salaried rather than hourly pay, were once the dreamy goals of another progressive--Walter Reuther.

Emphasis Has Changed

“I’ve been in this union since 1948, and I don’t think our objectives have changed--only the emphasis is different because of changing conditions,” Ephlin says. “I was at the bargaining table with Walter Reuther, and I heard his dream for the future. Now, because of the troubles the union has faced, people who weren’t around then and don’t know what Reuther said are casting these issues in a different light.”

Bieber denies that he had any serious disputes with Ephlin.

“There have always been, and always will be, different views in this union, and that’s healthy,” Bieber says. “But that doesn’t mean there are huge differences.”

Insiders say that Bieber strongly believes in the concept of union solidarity, and tolerates Ephlin’s frequent disagreements with his policies because he believes that Ephlin has the union’s interests at heart.

Ephlin’s views seem now to be so out of favor that he no longer represents a realistic alternative--or a threat--to Bieber. “If Owen tripped up, someone more militant would take over--not Don Ephlin,” one union source says.