GM Van Nuys: Labor Pioneer : TAKING ON GENERAL MOTORS A Case Study of the UAW Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open <i> by Eric Mann (Institute of Industrial Relations, UCLA: $22; 408 pp.) </i>
General Motors and the United Automobile Workers union stand at the center of one of the most compelling dramas of our time--the struggle of American industry to become competitive in global markets. After 25 years of American preeminence, during which corporate managers, organized workers, and U.S. citizens gained an overweening belief in their eternal superiority to “foreigners,” the nation’s manufacturing sector is desperately struggling to become “world class.”
Many economists and business executives, as well as some union leaders, believe that the key to success is transforming the work processes and the adversarial labor relations systems that just a generation ago were hailed as the secret of our economy’s success. According to the most progressive thinking, the mass-production system pioneered by Henry Ford and perfected by General Motors 50 years ago created obstacles to attaining the high-quality, maximum-efficiency operations now necessary to compete with the new champions, the Japanese. Under the mass-production system, workers followed their supervisors’ orders, performing the same routine tasks over and over. In exchange for higher-than-average wages, workers were denied the most minimal freedom, the ability to think for themselves, and the possibility of developing interest in their work. In response, workers organized unions and bargained for work rules that gave them a sense of predictability on the job, and that limited factory management’s arbitrary authority.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the consequences of this rigid system of organizing industrial work--wildcat strikes, absenteeism, alcoholism and drug abuse, poor product quality, and low productivity--had become a widely acknowledged social problem. The UAW, long the nation’s most progressive labor union, took the lead in exploring ways to improve “the quality of work life.” As Japanese imports cut into the revenues of American auto makers, Ford and General Motors joined with the UAW in efforts to transform industrial work and restore U.S. competitiveness.
Humanizing work and increasing economic efficiency are such widely shared social goals that it is small wonder that the press has given consistently sympathetic treatment to the reform efforts. Eminent professors at the nation’s leading universities lent their prestige to the movement with studies that seemed to show that efforts to transform American industrial relations were succeeding admirably. In Washington, promoting labor-management relations became a bipartisan cause; the Reagan Labor Department even appointed a long-time liberal Democratic labor man to spearhead federal efforts to encourage cooperative endeavors.
Unfortunately, there has been little analysis of what is actually happening in industrial workplaces. “Taking on General Motors,” Eric Mann’s stirring “case study of the UAW campaign to keep GM Van Nuys open,” provides readers with a rare inside look at the reform movement in action.
In 1982, General Motors warned that its Van Nuys assembly plant in the San Fernando Valley was likely to be shut down. Amid an industrial depression, Van Nuys, which produced Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds, seemed to be beyond saving. Not only was the plant outmoded, it was thousands of miles from GM’s parts suppliers. This meant that parts made in Ohio and Michigan had to be shipped to Van Nuys to be assembled, and then most of the finished cars had to be shipped back across the Rockies for sale. It would have been perfectly understandable for members of UAW Local 645 at Van Nuys, many of whom had already experienced the shutdown of GM’s South Gate plant, to conclude that they were powerless to resist company demands for massive local concessions as the price of keeping the plant open.
Instead, a group of union activists, including the author Eric Mann, organized an astonishingly successful campaign to organize community and labor support to force GM to keep Van Nuys open. Even when GM executives assured civic and community leaders that it had no immediate shutdown plans, the auto workers continued to reach out to church congregations, black and Chicano groups, politicians, fraternal associations, and other unionists; the Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open threatened a regional boycott of all GM products if the company shut down the West Coast’s last auto assembly plant. Imaginative organizing enabled the campaign to overcome the racial divisions that often stymie social action; the boycott threat attained real credibility when campaign planners developed a feasible strategy for picketing GM dealers and generating negative publicity to cripple GM in one of its most lucrative and important markets.
But GM did not allow the campaign to define the plant-closing issue. The second half of Mann’s tale provides a fascinating portrait of how auto workers responded to GM’s offer to keep Van Nuys open if and only if workers agreed to the new cooperative labor relations.
When GM executives sent a new plant superintendent to Van Nuys armed with a proposal to involve workers in management, upgrade worker skills, and provide workers with varied jobs, auto workers faced a dilemma: What GM was offering seemed to be just what workers wanted, but could they trust the same company that had just been threatening their livelihood? Moreover, GM wanted workers to give up protections they had fought long and hard for, but the company would make no long-term commitment to keep Van Nuys open. What to do?
Although Mann is a partisan, he presents a complex and honest account of the workers’ ambivalent response to GM’s initiative. One union faction, with the blessing of international UAW leaders, embraced GM’s offer and began attacking the union’s militants as radicals who didn’t care about workers’ jobs. In the fall of 1986, when GM announced that Van Nuys was not on the list of 11 plants it was closing to reduce capacity in the face of sliding sales, this faction claimed credit for saving the plant.
Another faction, led by long-time local President Pete Beltran, argued against making concessions to GM without guarantees of job security. Arguing that it was the threat of the boycott that kept Van Nuys open, the militants warned that if the unionists laid down their arms, GM would run roughshod over them.
Most recently, Van Nuys has been in the news because of a controversy over work sharing. During this past winter when GM cut back production because of slow sales of the Camaros and Firebirds assembled at Van Nuys, the UAW agreed to a company proposal to divide up the available work by assigning employees on the day shift, who tend to be older workers with high seniority, to work two weeks per month, while those on the night shift, who tend to be younger, and who otherwise would have been temporarily laid off, were assigned to work the other two weeks.
High seniority workers objected to the proposal, which reduced their income about 10%. Both shifts are now working full-time again, but the dispute intensified already serious discontent within the local, and prompted some unhappy unionists to charge the UAW with abandoning sacred principles.
For the last two years, the competing factions have attracted roughly equal support from a membership that desperately wants to believe that GM’s cooperative program is genuine but strongly suspects that it’s just a ruse for eliminating jobs and speeding up work. The recent dispute over work sharing grows out of these previous divisions within the work force.
Mann’s book allows us to look at just what most accounts of the cooperation movement ignore--the workings of a democratic union where members weigh their experiences and try to solve new and wholly unexpected problems. Where else in American society do people have an opportunity to participate so directly in charting the future?
Like any good book, “Taking On General Motors” leaves the reader wishing for more--especially about what actually happened when management and labor implemented the new labor relations system within the plant. Nevertheless, the book provides unique insights into the difficult tasks facing the United States as it tries to find its way in the new global marketplace.
