Defeated UAW Dissidents Vow Election Challenges
A dissident movement inside the United Auto Workers union, seeking to curb labor-management cooperation in the auto industry, has suffered a series of political setbacks in local union elections in recent days, the group acknowledged Tuesday.
But the dissidents charge that the UAW leadership has engaged in widespread election fraud and say they plan to appeal the results, both at the union’s national convention in Anaheim in June and in the courts.
UAW officials deny the charges, but admit that the bitter election campaign may lead to a serious rift within the nation’s most influential industrial union.
Donny Douglas, a charismatic local union leader from Pontiac, Mich., has lost his bid to unseat an incumbent UAW regional director in the Detroit area, and thus gain a seat on the union’s governing executive board.
Meanwhile, another dissident, Jerry Tucker, is also apparently losing in his campaign for re-election as regional director in the St. Louis area. UAW officials say Tucker, who won the seat in a court-ordered election last fall, has been unseated by a candidate backed by union President Owen Bieber, but Tucker has not yet conceded.
Douglas, a longtime dissident who has frequently opposed contract concessions in the auto industry, campaigned against a wide array of joint labor-management programs that have been accepted by the UAW’s leadership. He charged that those “team-oriented” programs have done little more than give management extra leverage over workers, and have eroded the union’s power on the shop floor.
Early Victories
At first, his assaults against the UAW leadership’s willingness to work more closely with management galvanized many rank-and-file workers at General Motors, and they flocked to his campaign.
He swept to early landslide victories in locals at GM plants in the eastside Detroit region. His success stunned UAW leaders, and they fought back hard.
UAW staffers were asked to contribute $500 apiece to finance a campaign to stop Douglas and Tucker, and Bieber and other UAW leaders visited plants throughout the two regions with contested elections.
In the end, Douglas failed to gain enough votes in the many Chrysler plants in the east Detroit region, and lost to incumbent Bob Lent, who was originally from a Chrysler local. At the same time, Tucker was trailing Roy Wyse, a former assistant regional director who was backed by Bieber.
Another test for the dissident movement came Tuesday, when workers at Mazda’s new U.S. assembly plant outside Detroit, now represented by the UAW, voted for local union officers for the first time. Phillip Keeling, a dissident running under Douglas’ “New Directions” banner, was challenging a UAW-backed candidate, Bill Judson.
Keeling was running in opposition to the union’s acceptance of Mazda’s Japanese-style workplace policies, most notably kaizen, a Japanese term defined as the search for continuous improvement. The dissidents at Mazda claim kaizen is just a Japanese word for a speed-up, and insist that the union should not work so closely with Mazda to achieve kaizen.
Judson and the UAW leadership, meanwhile, argue that the union should work with Mazda to modify kaizen, without rejecting it completely.
A dissident victory in the union fight at Mazda, one of three Japanese-managed U.S. assembly plants where workers now have UAW representation, could represent a fundamental challenge to Japanese efforts to import their management techniques to the United States.
Results from the Mazda election were not available late Tuesday night.
Despite their losses in the regional elections, leaders of the dissident group vowed to continue their fight at the UAW convention in Anaheim where delegates selected in the local elections will then actually choose regional directors and other union officers.
Although the UAW leadership now seems assured of a majority of delegates for its regional candidates, Pete Kelly, a longtime UAW dissident and Douglas’ campaign manager, vowed to challenge their credentials. He charges fraud in many of the local elections where pro-Bieber delegates were swept in.
Kelly also vowed to take the UAW’s leadership to court on charges of election fraud if Douglas loses at the convention.
Charges of Fraud
Among other things, Kelly alleges that the UAW leadership illegally used union and management resources to campaign for Administration-backed candidates. At one Ford plant in suburban Detroit, for example, the company agreed to shut down production for 45 minutes to allow Bieber to speak to workers just before the local election there.
Tucker also charges fraud, and has already protested 11 local elections in his region. “They are systematically stealing the thing,” Tucker said. “The position of the Bieber people is to win at all costs.”
UAW officials deny they have used improper tactics to win. “It’s not surprising they would make those charges and use exaggerated rhetoric,” said UAW spokesman Peter Laarman.
Still, some officials privately acknowledge that the strength of the dissident movement caught the leadership off guard, and may force the union to rethink some of its joint programs with management.
Times Staff Writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this article from Los Angeles.
