GM to Cut Hours of 3,800 Van Nuys Workers by 50%
General Motors, plagued by plunging car sales nationally, moved Thursday to avert a massive layoff at its huge assembly plant in Van Nuys by asking its 3,800 workers to work only two weeks a month.
The innovative plan for a 50% cut in work hours emerged as an alternative during a week of discussions between management and labor representatives at the plant. The plan--to be effective Feb. 1--still must be approved by members of United Auto Workers Local 645.
“We’re confident it will be approved by the membership,” said Jim Gaunt, personnel director of the Van Nuys plant. And local UAW President Jerry Shrieves agreed. “There is going to be some opposition to it but I think it will pass.”
The proposal comes at a time of increased union-labor harmony at GM after a new United Auto Workers labor agreement last fall that gave workers unprecedented guarantees of job security. In return, the union agreed to work with the company when plummeting car sales mandate layoffs.
The troubles at Van Nuys are symptomatic of GM’s problems nationally. The cars built there--Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds--are not selling well and the plant has been beset with labor problems for years. Yet there has been enormous community pressure on GM to keep the plant open. It is the only major auto assembly plant remaining in Southern California.
The Van Nuys plant normally operates on two shifts--a day shift and a night shift. Under the plan announced Thursday, the plant would staff only one shift at a time and employ workers on an alternating schedule. Day shift employees would work for two weeks while night-shift employees were on layoff. Then night shift employees would work for two weeks and day employees would go on layoff.
The plant has been closed since Dec. 23 for an extended holiday hiatus. Employees are scheduled to return to work Jan. 18 and are expected to vote on the work reduction plan between that date and Feb. 1.
Gaunt would not say what GM’s alternative plan is if the union membership fails to ratify the plan.
The work reduction represents a departure for the auto industry, which usually effects work force cuts with full-time layoffs. A similar work-sharing program was put into effect Nov. 1 to avoid layoffs at a GM assembly plant in Oshawa, Canada. Pontiac 6000s and Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras are produced at the Canadian plant.
The part-time layoff was negotiated by union and GM officials before Christmas. Officials for both the union and GM said the plan has two benefits. It allows all of the workers to earn close to full pay because their reduced wages would be supplemented by unemployment benefits through a special fund created by the company and the union some time ago.
Gaunt said officials believe the layoff is only temporary but said car sales have to pick up for the plant to return to two shifts.
“We’re very encouraged we will be able to return to two shifts,” he said. “We see nothing on the horizon that this is the permanent elimination of the second shift,” Gaunt said.
Shrieves said he hoped to have the second shift back to work on a full-time basis by May.
Auto sales for 1987, reported Wednesday, were down for all U.S. car makers, but GM suffered the largest decline, 21.6%. The company has seen its share of the car market fall from 41.1% in 1986 to 36.6% in 1987.
Team Concept
Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley met with GM officials at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York Thursday, where GM has been having a special show of its cars of the future. A Bradley aide said that the mayor had been told by Robert C. Stempel, GM’s president, that the auto maker was committed to keeping the Van Nuys plant open.
In May, GM installed a new and controversial manufacturing method at the Van Nuys plant called “team concept.” Under that method, employees work in groups on entire sections of a car, instead of performing a single repetitive task. Gaunt said the current plan would allow those teams to continue to work together.
When the “team concept” was introduced last year, company and some union officials said it would extend the life of the plant but GM never agreed to an indefinite commitment, saying that was unrealistic. Company officials said the plant’s future was assured until 1990, when there may be a model change.
For the month ended Nov. 30, GM had a 150-day inventory of Camaros and a 95-day inventory of Firebirds.
The plant has experienced layoffs of workers during recent years and in late 1982 workers learned that the plant was on an “endangered list.” In the spring of 1983, Pete Beltran, then UAW Local 645 president, launched a campaign to secure a guarantee from GM to keep the plant open indefinitely and threatened to launch a boycott of GM cars in Southern California if the company shut the factory down.
The campaign gathered considerable political backing. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez, actor Ed Asner, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City) Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and numerous Southern California clergymen have appeared at rallies urging the company to keep the factory open.
Although Southern California is the largest new car market in the nation, the Van Nuys plant is the only auto assembly facility in the area. In recent years, GM closed a factory in South Gate and Ford shut down a plant in Pico Rivera. The only other auto assembly facility in the state is the joint venture-plant of GM and Toyota in Fremont.
