UAW Divided Over Way to Save GM Plant
An ugly intraunion dispute over strategy, like those plaguing several unions across the nation these days, is badly dividing United Auto Workers Local 645, which represents workers at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys.
The local argument reflects a fundamental conflict over the question of whether extensive labor-management cooperation will ultimately weaken or strengthen organized labor--and whether more militancy or more cooperation is the best strategy for labor.
As of now, the divided Local 645 leaders are trying both simultaneously:
- The militants, led by Local President Peter Z. Beltran, fear that too much cooperation will lead to the weakening, if not the elimination, of the union. On April 26, they will put on another in a series of demonstrations that they have been holding for nearly three years to warn GM that if it shuts down the Van Nuys plant, the local union will attempt a massive nationwide boycott of all GM products. The militants, as they like to be called, oppose the approach used by those who see almost automatic adversary company-union relations as counterproductive.
- Other union leaders, such as Ray Ruiz, head of Local 645’s bargaining committee, and Bruce Lee, UAW Western regional director, don’t think much of the boycott threat. If it does come about, and if it results in a substantial cut in GM sales, it will mean layoffs of other UAW members in other plants. Those opposed to the Beltran philosophy believe that cooperation offers the best hope for saving the Van Nuys plant and for the revitalization of unions generally.
Ruiz and eight other union representatives have already started meeting with an equal number of Van Nuys plant management officials to try to work out an agreement comparable to other UAW-GM agreements that, among other things, substantially reduce the role of supervisors and increase the authority of workers.
While there are exceptions, cooperation seems to be working reasonably well and, in any case, is better than constant labor-management battles.
The joint-venture plant of GM and Toyota at Fremont, Calif., for instance, has for nearly two years been using a cooperative system developed by Lee, the UAW regional director, and other union representatives and company officials. Once the most contentious of all GM plants, absenteeism at the Fremont facility has been reduced to about 2% from nearly 20%, wages have gone to $14.11 an hour, compared to the GM average of $13.25, and workers’ grievances, which once ran as high as 5,000 a year, have almost been eliminated.
The Van Nuys plant manager, Ernie Schaefer, and Ruiz, the UAW Local 645 official, say the way to prevent a shutdown of the plant is to make it operate as efficiently as possible. And Ruiz says he will not agree to any significant contract changes unless GM clearly indicates that it plans to keep the plant open and unless the union membership approves the changes.
“We are not planning to make any concessions,” Ruiz insisted. “Both management and workers must gain from any agreement, and we hope one can be reached by June.”
Schaefer said: “Our problem is that we (executives) are going to have to give workers the ability to solve their own job problems with less and less supervision. We’ve got to stop hiring people from their shoulders on down without any interest in their brainpower.”
Cooperation may not achieve all of its goals. The militants, like Beltran, say that without the threat of a boycott against GM, the company will do little if anything to help workers and will close the plant here because it doesn’t realize the value of producing cars in Southern California, the largest market for cars per capita in the world.
But the fact is that GM is such a giant multinational corporation that the threat of a boycott by relatively few workers is not likely to be a significant factor in its decision. Closing the plant would almost surely be a foolish corporate error.
But GM corporate errors are not unknown, such as the recent decision to boost prices at a time when Japanese auto companies are also raising their prices because of the rising value of the yen against the dollar. (Despite the cooperation between the UAW and GM at the national level, the GM pricing decision was made without giving the union any chance to voice its strong opposition.)
But, in any case, unions have little real choice in their arguments over cooperation versus adversary relations with management. If they treat management as an implacable foe that can rarely, if ever, be trusted, unionism will continue to decline in this country.
That doesn’t mean that cooperative labor relations are always possible. More and more companies are hiring expensive “union busters,” and obviously it doesn’t do much good for unions to try to cooperate with firms that are determined to destroy them.
But times have changed. It was exactly 100 years ago that the ruthless financier Jay Gould, boasting of his ability to break any union strike, said, in a widely quoted speech: “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half!”
Those days of open, unrestrained violence by corporations to defeat attempts to unionize workers--and of often violent union retaliation--are pretty much over. But workers can still be pitted against workers with considerable, though less deadly, success, as evidenced by, for instance, the easy time that TWA is having in recruiting workers to break the prolonged strike by its flight attendants.
More and more frequently, however, deeply committed unionists are battling one another furiously over the best tactics to be used in dealing with companies that at least say they want harmonious relations with workers and their unions. Probably the most publicized such fight nationally is still raging between officers of the United Food and Commercial Workers and its Local P-9 in Austin, Minn., which is striking the Geo. A. Hormel & Co. plant there despite opposition from the national union.
The fight within the UAW in Van Nuys has not yet gained national attention. But both intra-union battles, at Hormel and at the GM plant, help make the same point: Militant unions can help workers improve their wages and job conditions, which is why most of them join unions in the first place. But militancy alone cannot achieve those goals.
Progress for both corporate shareholders and workers is best made when management and workers unite their forces cooperatively in their common cause of sharing the gains that they can make most effectively together.
The Heavyweight Clerk
Arbitrator Louis Zigman wasn’t persuaded that a weightlifter employed as a grocery clerk by Ralphs supermarket just didn’t know his own strength. As a result, Zigman upheld the company’s discharge of the weightlifting member of the Retail Clerks Local 770 for trying to sneak out with 15 cans of dog food that he had not purchased.
Security guards found the cans of dog food in a large cardboard box under some bulk dry dog food that the worker had paid for and was legally carrying home.
The union contended in an arbitration of the discharge that the worker didn’t know the cans had been put inside the box. As a weightlifter, it was argued, his strength was so great that he wasn’t even aware of the extra 20 pounds of canned dog food in the 20-pound box of bulk dog food.
Zigman, though, said that since the cans were “secreted” under the bulk dry dog food, “that constituted evidence of an intent to hide the merchandise, and that certainly creates a strong presumption of misconduct.”
The arbitrator said he was not impressed by the the argument that the worker’s strength was so great that he couldn’t tell that the box was particularly heavy.
