MAVERICK : UAW Dissident Is Gaining Followers in Fight Against Union’s Concessions to Auto Industry

In the cramped back room of the White Heather Social Club in this blue-collar Detroit suburb, one of the nation’s most influential industrial unions is being shaken to its foundation.

And it is just one man, one true rebel--an affable local unionist named Donny Douglas--doing the shaking.

The White Heather is now the busy nerve center of Douglas’ grass-roots, dissident campaign to unseat the powerful, incumbent director of the largest region in the 1.1-million-member United Auto Workers, and thus gain a seat on the international union’s governing executive board.

But Douglas’ campaign is more; it represents nothing less than the most serious challenge yet to the new spirit of cooperation between labor and management in the American auto industry.

And right now, Douglas has the UAW’s hierarchy running scared--because he’s winning.

Douglas, the 47-year-old president of a big UAW local at a General Motors truck factory in Pontiac, Mich., has galvanized support for his candidacy among rank-and-file union members in plant after plant in the UAW’s heartland--its 110,000-member eastside Detroit region. He has tapped into their deep sense of frustration and anger over the union’s inability to protect them from the new competitive pressures in the auto industry, pressures that continue to lead to layoffs and plant closings.

“There is discontent out there,” Douglas said. “We are continually getting beaten over the heads by management to give more. Concessions have devastated people’s lives, but the leadership (of the UAW) doesn’t have an agenda of recovery, one that would help us get back our losses.”

“The feeling among the workers is that we are losing everything without protesting, without a peep,” adds Joe Landry, a line worker at GM’s Lake Orion, Mich., assembly plant, who is working for the Douglas campaign in his spare time.

Douglas, a longtime critic of the union leadership who has opposed contract concessions since 1982, is running hard on what he calls a “New Directions” platform calling for a return to a more traditional, get-tough policy toward management. He wants to bring an end to what he sees as the UAW’s sellout of its membership through the leadership’s acceptance of new joint union-management programs that now cover many aspects of shop floor working conditions in the auto industry.

But above all, he wants management to once again fear the power of the UAW. He wants the union to hit back hard when companies pit workers against each other, forcing the industry to think twice before they “whipsaw” the UAW by threatening to move work and jobs to whichever location offers the lowest labor costs and most maleable factory work rules.

“I’ve always been against concessions, because once you start giving to management, you never quit giving,” Douglas said. “We’ve got to put the companies on notice that concessions have to stop, we’ve got to stop letting them whipsaw our plants. We’ve got to take labor out of competition.”

UAW leaders blast Douglas as nothing more than a Luddite, a reactionary who wants to turn back the clock to the days when the Japanese were nowhere to be seen, the domestic industry had a monopoly and the UAW held the upper hand in its bargaining sessions with the car companies.

“We have a group in the UAW who I call the ‘Old Directions,’ people who are prisoners of the past,” said former UAW President Douglas Fraser in a speech attacking Douglas at the Detroit Economic Club last week. “They yearn to go back to the comfortable days of the 1950s and 1960s. But those who say we can go back to those days are guilty of deception, and they are fools.”

UAW President Owen Bieber adds that Douglas has been distorting the union’s record on concessions and charges that his campaign literature is filled with “lies.”

But Douglas can’t be dismissed so easily by the leadership. He is saying things that rank-and-file UAW members have been saying among themselves for years, and so they are rallying to him in droves. “New Directions” dissidents are now popping up in UAW locals all around Detroit, and are even fielding a slate of candidates for the first local union election at Mazda’s new plant in Flat Rock, Mich.

“The people are fed up,” said Vern Schultz, another Douglas supporter from the Orion plant. “We have been treated for the last 10 years like mindless people who don’t understand what’s going on, and who shouldn’t have any say.

“The people we’ve got in there running the union now have forgotten where they came from,” Schultz added. “We want people like Douglas in there who have gotten their hands dirty with us.”

After landslide wins among workers at some of the biggest factories in the region--including several GM assembly plants--Douglas has a commanding lead over the incumbent, Robert Lent, in pledged delegates from local unions to the international union’s June convention in Anaheim, where regional directors will be elected. Douglas’ drive has been buoyed by an endorsement from Victor Reuther, the brother of the UAW’s founding father, the late Walter Reuther.

If he wins, Douglas will join one other outsider on the 21-member board--Jerry Tucker, a union staffer who broke with the leadership when he unseated the incumbent director of the UAW’s St. Louis region.

But while Tucker’s election revolved heavily around local politics, Douglas’ campaign represents much more of a true ideological challenge to Bieber’s administration.

A Douglas victory would be a repudiation of the fundamental direction the union has followed throughout the 1980s. Simply stated, that policy is based on the belief that it is better to work with management than against it, that an adversarial relationship leads to inefficiency, and eventually a loss of competitiveness.

Douglas isn’t against all of the joint labor-management programs established in recent years and says he supports efforts to improve quality. But he argues that while labor productivity in the auto industry has soared, the workers have nothing to show for it. And despite joint programs on the shop floor, he says, work is still getting moved to non-union factories, and plants are still getting shuttered.

“The workers have answered the call to improve productivity and quality, but our standard of living keeps slipping,” Douglas said.

Even if Douglas doesn’t win his race--Lent seems to be staging a comeback in recent voting at some locals and several big locals have yet to vote--he seems to have unleashed a powerful backlash against the UAW’s policies of increased cooperation with management. That may force the union to move more slowly in its dealings with management.

“We’re not trying to overthrow the union,” Douglas said. “We’re just trying to change its direction.”