UAW Chief Vows to Organize Japan’s U.S. Plants
The president of the United Auto Workers vowed Sunday that the union would organize auto plants operated by Japanese firms in the United States that, thus far, appear to be impervious to unionization efforts.
“I don’t doubt for a moment that we’ll be welcoming UAW delegates from Nissan’s Tennessee plant and Honda’s Ohio plant at a future UAW convention,” Owen Bieber said in his keynote address opening the union’s 50th anniversary constitutional convention at the Anaheim Convention Center.
Last year, the union launched an organizing campaign at Honda’s Marysville, Ohio, plant and a representation election was scheduled for December. However, the election was delayed after the UAW filed unfair labor practice charges against the company. Then, in March, the union withdrew its election petition after the Cleveland regional office of the National Labor Relations Board dismissed the charges.
Union to Regroup
“I believe the UAW would have won if Honda hadn’t engaged in illegal acts. And I think we would have prevailed in our case if the Labor Board wasn’t dominated by Reagan appointees,” Bieber said in an interview before the convention. He said the union would regroup, use some new tactics and devote more resources to organizing Honda’s workers in the near future.
But he did not elaborate in the interview, or in his speech, on the union’s future strategy for organizing the companies he calls “transplants,” from Japan.
The UAW’s inability to organize the “transplants” is a critical part of the problems it now faces. The 1.1 million-member union expects to lose 118,000 auto plant and supplier jobs in the next five years as the domestic car industry shrinks because of overcapacity.
On the other hand, there will be significantly increased production by Japanese auto makers in this country, compounding the union’s growing problem with imports from Japan, Brazil, South Korea and Yugoslavia. Imports are expected to comprise 30% of the domestic market this year and may snare up to 36% by 1988, according to the Commerce Department.
Thus far, the UAW has only two labor agreements with Japanese manufacturers in the United States. One is at the Toyota-General Motors joint venture plant in Fremont, Calif., where the union previously had a contract with GM. Mazda has already agreed to grant UAW recognition for its new facility now under construction in Flat Rock, Mich.
Nissan officials have stated that they intend to continue operating their Smyrna, Tenn., plant on a non-union basis.
“Let me remind Nissan that Henry Ford made the same boast 50 years ago,” Bieber told the 2,500 convention delegates Sunday. “We intend to win at Nissan and we will.”
However, to date, the UAW has not developed enough support at Smyrna to file for a union recognition election. Bieber said the workers there had been screened very carefully in an attempt to keep out union sympathizers.
Bieber acknowledged in his speech that the union, whose membership ranks have shrunk by about 400,000 from a high of 1.5 million in 1979, faces several major challenges and some unfamiliar problems.
Several Challenges
Among the key challenges, he said, is for the UAW to be “innovative and tough in waging the struggle for economic progress and job security through collective bargaining.”
Bieber said the union had done well in bargaining with the “Big Three” U.S. auto makers in 1984 and 1985, although it had to wage a 12-day strike at Chrysler last year to reach its goals.
“The 1987 bargaining won’t be easier than what we faced in 1984,” he said. “It could be harder, depending on how soft auto sales get and how vehicles produced here fare against the growing number of imports. . . .
“Despite our patience, despite our desire to cooperate, despite our desire to achieve peaceful agreement, the UAW will go to war” at the bargaining table, if necessary, he warned “Big Three” executives.
Despite Bieber’s tough rhetoric, some UAW members feel that, in its attempts to adapt to a changed economic environment, the union has abandoned some of its traditional principles and has become too accommodating with auto makers in an attempt to save jobs.
Challenges From Dissidents
Dissidents, such as Pete Kelly of Warren, Mich., will attempt to question the direction the union is taking, primarily through resolutions critical of the UAW’s ballyhooed 1985 agreement with General Motors’ new Saturn Corp.
The plant is supposed to begin building small cars in Spring Hill, Tenn., in 1989. The pact there stresses cooperation between workers and managers. Workers will be paid only 80% of what union employees get at comparable factories, but will share in profits and also could earn bonuses for topping production goals.
But Kelly contends the agreement would endanger hard-won seniority systems and other traditional work rules.
Bieber made no direct reference to the Saturn controversy Sunday. He said the UAW would not forget past struggles “and the pain it took to get where we are today.” But, he quickly added, “let me also say that those who only remember the past may not know when it’s over.”
The union leader dealt at length with one recent unfamiliar UAW problem Sunday--a case of corruption in a union that prides itself upon integrity.
Board Member Convicted
Last Thursday, Frank E. Runnels, a member of the union’s executive board, was convicted of federal charges of accepting kickbacks from Detroit-area lawyers for directing workers’ compensation cases to them. Union officials said it was the first time there had been such a conviction of a ranking UAW official. The UAW’s response was swift: At a meeting of its executive board in Anaheim on Thursday, Runnels was dismissed from his post.
“I want to pledge to you today on behalf of myself and my fellow officers that as long as I am president of our great union, it’s going to be a clean and honest union with the highest standard of integrity,” Bieber told the delegates from 1,400 locals, who rose in a standing ovation.
Still, most of Bieber’s lengthy speech was upbeat. He said that the union gained 33,000 new members last year, the lion’s share being 22,000 public employees from Michigan who previously had been in an unaffiliated employee association. He said the membership increase was the greatest in 25 years.
Bieber, 56--who is expected to win easy reelection to a second, three-year term Wednesday--also announced that the union would establish a “Commission on the UAW Future,” which would seek the advice of “the best outside experts we can find” in an attempt to help shape the union’s course for the next decade.
Critical of the current Republican Administration’s anti-labor policies, Bieber urged the traditionally Democratic union’s members to help the party retake the Senate and the White House by electing “leaders who share the labor movement’s concerns for social, economic and political justice. I know you share my frustration and disgust with the kind of politics we have seen so far in the 1980s.”
