Coalition Deserves Support for Its Bid to Keep Local GM Plant Open

Aconfrontation is developing in Van Nuys, where General Motors has announced plans to end the second shift at its plant there this June and has openly threatened its employees by saying that it may close it permanently as early as 1988. United Auto Workers Local 645 and a coalition of other labor unions, churches and community leaders plan to demonstrate Saturday, demanding that GM keep the plant open for at least 10 more years or--as a last resort--face a boycott throughout Los Angeles.

The coalition, now in its fourth year, has been widely praised for acting before having been handed a fait accompli and for the breadth of its membership, which ranges from small businesses in the San Fernando Valley to community groups in East Los Angeles and Baptist churches in South-Central Los Angeles.

But recently, some of labor’s more company-oriented strategists have launched an attack on the coalition, claiming, on the one hand, that a boycott could not succeed and, on the other, that it would prove divisive if it did succeed, by bringing layoffs at other GM plants.

This contradictory criticism recalls the hotel guest who complained: “The food was like poison, and the portions were too small.” Indeed, the coalition has the chance both to reverse GM’s plan to close the plant and to provide advocates of a socially responsible industrial policy with a much-needed victory.

GM’s first problem is that its explanations for wanting to leave Los Angeles are unconvincing. The company wants to consolidate production in the Midwest, stamping, manufacturing, assembling and shipping automobiles from a geographically centralized hub. Does the leading company of the Fortune 500 have a right to abandon communities and workers that have supported it for decades every time it wants to reorganize production?

In contrast, the coalition offers an affirmative, community-oriented proposal, based on the fact that GM sold more than 407,000 vehicles in California last year and more than 646,000 in the Western states.

Purchase Local Parts

In the coalition’s view, GM could dramatically increase efficiency by opening a stamping plant in Los Angeles, purchasing parts from more local contractors and hiring former workers from GM Southgate and other recently closed plants in the area, making Los Angeles a major auto manufacturing center for the Western states.

The boycott would be used only after GM actually moved to close the plant in Van Nuys. At present, many religious, political and business leaders, as well as the UAW’s local leadership, are trying to persuade GM to make a long-term commitment to Los Angeles. But if--after four years of marches, petitions and public and private discussions to try to head off this confrontation--GM pushes ahead with the plant closure, rebuffed community leaders would readily help organize a boycott.

If it came to that, GM would discover that auto dealers present vulnerable targets. Unlike, for example, boycotting a pen company, a product sold everywhere at tiny profit margins, there are only about 200 GM dealers in the Southland. Moreover, each individual boycotter takes thousands of dollars away from GM. When unions, churches and community groups actively wage a boycott in a given community, their impact can make the difference between a profit and a loss at many a dealership. GM risks severe disruption of its assiduously cultivated dealership network.

Organizing Students, Consumers

In addition, few consumers retain much product loyalty. With this in mind, the coalition is organizing 5,000 students and 20,000 consumers for a letter-writing campaign to General Motors promising to visit a GM dealership before buying their next car if GM makes the 10-year commitment to stay in the community--but promising also to boycott GM if it moves out.

As students at UCLA, Cal State Northridge and other educational institutions sign these pledges, GM will have the choice of reaching out to or alienating a generation of first-time buyers in Los Angeles.

Moreover, as the plant’s work force is more than 50% Latino and 15% black--echoing the heavily minority composition of so many of the closed industrial plants in Los Angeles--GM should not minimize the cohesiveness and militancy of past successful boycotts led by minorities. Boycotts are very hard to start but also very hard to stop. If the boycott does take off, GM is risking long-term animus in the largest new-car market in the United States.

But what of the charges that the coalition would pit local against local within the United Auto Workers? Ironically, it is not the possibility of a boycott but present company threats of plant closings that has created a frightening, cutthroat competition among many UAW locals.

Individual locals, in a misguided effort to save their plants, offer the company concession after concession, only to be undercut by other locals offering even more concessions--a pattern of whipsawing that threatens to destroy the union as an effective national organization.

That is why Local 645 has been asking the UAW International to demand a moratorium on plant closings in the GM system similar to what was won from Ford in the last contract negotiations with that company. This would stop GM’s threats, at least temporarily, and provide a unified, national approach to the problem.

But if GM appeals to our international union and some short-sighted locals to look the other way as it closes its last plant in Southern California--where political reverberations will be less great than a closure in Detroit--GM’s regional disinvestment policy would make a regional boycott strategy inevitable.

Through the help of a sympathetic film maker, the coalition has told its story through the documentary “Tiger by the Tail,” selected as the best labor film at this year’s American Film Festival in New York. It also has reached out to other UAW locals for support.

Contrary to critics’ predictions, response by most local presidents has been very supportive; they are encouraged that at least one local is trying to fight a plant closure before it happens, and they are trying to explain to their membership that layoffs resulting from the boycott should be met by pressure on GM to reopen the plant--not by hostility to a local fighting back as a last resort.

These years of organizing work are creating growing social constraints on GM’s profit-maximizing options. As 1988 approaches, it would be a disastrous political and economic decision for the company to pull the trigger on the Van Nuys plant--unless it wants to shoot itself in the foot.