UAW, Auto Makers’ Arsenals Weak as Contract Talks Near : Labor: Workers, whose ranks have thinned, want job security and a decision-making role. The Big Three will likely point to drops in sales and market share.
One by one, delegates to the United Auto Workers’ collective bargaining convention came to the microphone this week to tell sad stories about vanishing automobile plant jobs and to demand that their leaders stop the hemorrhaging.
“Our people are getting to be like migrant workers!” said one. “We’re becoming gypsies,” another complained.
Such stories were supposed to have been put to rest by the last round of contracts that the UAW signed with the Big Three auto makers in 1987 and 1988. Union leaders hailed the pacts as containing unprecedented job-security provisions, including a virtual ban on plant closings. In exchange, the union agreed to concessions on wages and productivity.
Then came the American auto recession of the late 1980s and layoffs of a size that hadn’t been seen for nearly a decade. Using loopholes in the contract, General Motors and Chrysler have closed seven plants in the three years. At GM alone, 36,000 workers are on indefinite layoff.
Against this background, 2,000 delegates to the UAW convention spent Monday and Tuesday trying to figure out how to muscle an iron-clad job-security guarantee out of GM, Chrysler and Ford when contracts covering 450,000 auto workers expire in mid-September.
The problem is there is not much muscle on either side and, as a result, not much room for maneuvering. More than half the union’s rank-and-file members are already making financial preparations for a strike, according to a Detroit News poll. The union, still one of the largest in the nation, has lost a quarter of a million members in the auto sector during the past decade.
The Big Three’s share of the American auto market has dropped from 84% to 69% in the past decade, and analysts expect it to fall further, thanks to imports and Japanese cars produced in the United States.
This year, Big Three sales are down 9%. Although Ford is relatively healthy, GM and Chrysler are on the ropes. GM, the industry giant, is especially burdened, with more cars than it can sell.
Union leaders say the industry created its own problems. They hope to use the coming round of contract negotiations to win more union participation not only on the shop floor but also in design, pricing and marketing. They want to pressure Detroit into a partnership in which auto makers give up some short-term profitability and workers are treated as a “fixed investment, rather than an expendable commodity that can be avoided through a layoff,” according to a resolution adopted by the convention.
“We’ve had enough of paying for their mistakes and mismanagement,” UAW President Owen Bieber said. “The old conception of management rights is a dinosaur at this time of acute crisis. . . . We seek and demand a new standard of corporate accountability.”
The auto talks will be watched not only for what they mean to the industry but also for the broader role they play in organized labor’s painful shift from adversarial, wage-based bargaining to a system that stresses more cooperation and trade-offs. Union workers in auto, meatpacking and steel--clinging to increasingly rare $15-an-hour industrial jobs--are frustrated by continuing job losses despite past concessions.
“What happens in these negotiations will exert significant influence over collective bargaining in the future,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor of work and technology at UC San Diego.
In its pursuit of job security, the union is seeking limits on management authority that would be revolutionary in American industrial relations.
Among the most popular worker suggestions discussed this week were a ban on “out-sourcing,” in which car parts are produced by foreign or non-union companies; a reduction in the workweek to less than 40 hours without a decrease in pay; restoration of numerous paid holidays--lost in previous contracts--to force corporations to hire more workers, and a ban on further layoffs, unless an auto maker’s future is “severely at risk as a result of conditions beyond their control.”
Yet for all the tough talk, there was a telling display of caution by Bieber, the union president.
On Tuesday, he beat back a strong grass-roots campaign that would have directed him to bargain for the addition of an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to the pensions of retirees.
UAW leaders, aware that Detroit will push hard in the negotiations to control pension and health-care costs, said they did not wish to have their hands tied in bargaining. A pension COLA would cost auto makers as much as all wages and benefits negotiated during the last contract, they argued.
The often-emotional demands by older auto workers and retirees for a pension COLA highlighted the fact that a disproportionate number of UAW members are nearing middle-age and are willing to make way for younger workers if pension and early retirement plans are improved.
The COLA movement also gave voice to the UAW’s particularly keen resentment of GM and its outgoing chairman, Roger B. Smith. COLA supporters often noted that GM’s board recently voted to double Smith’s pension to $1.2 million a year.
The weakness of the current contract was made clear to workers in mid-1988, when GM closed a Pontiac, Mich., plant and laid off 1,700 workers after a sharp decline in sales of the two-seat Fiero sports car produced there.
Two months ago, an arbitrator ruled that the closure did not breach the contract. Union leaders immediately stepped up their call for tighter job-security protection.
Bieber said managers would understand that giving workers total job security is beneficial when they “discovered what fully motivated, fully secure workers can contribute to their success.”
Auto workers already receive a variety of benefits devised during the past decade to cope with massive plant closings. Depending on seniority, laid-off workers may receive up to 95% of their take-home pay for up to two years. Also, a job-bank program funded by auto makers attempts to find work for displaced workers.
Big Three and UAW officials have informally discussed the possibility of restructuring these programs. The changes, which would in effect acknowledge that lost jobs will never be restored, would focus more heavily on guaranteed income protection for laid-off workers and less on preserving a fixed number of jobs.
Union observers suggest that GM will be the first auto maker that the union attempts to settle with this summer--and thus will be the first potential strike target--because it has closed more plants and is viewed as most vulnerable to economic pressure.
“I would feel it’s a safe bet there’ll be a strike against one of the Big Three,” said Alan Benchich, vice president of the UAW local at a GM plant in Warren, Mich. “I have heard . . . (union members) say they need a new car, or something else major, but they’re putting it off until after September.”
