Ray of Hope for Van Nuys UAW
The General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, which many have feared would be shut down, will instead “definitely continue operations for many years to come,” according to a high-ranking union leader who ought to know.
The unusual but unambiguous assurance about the future of the plant came in an interview with Bruce Lee, United Auto Workers’ Western regional director. Normally, the company announces a policy decision about a plant’s future.
If Lee is right, the decision will have a major impact on the lives of the plant’s 3,500 workers, on a hotly contested UAW local officers’ election Wednesday, on a union and company effort to foster labor-management cooperation at the plant and throughout GM and on the Van Nuys area itself.
Lee says GM officials told him that the facility will be converted into a “flex” plant, which means it will be capable of shifting production quickly from one model to another. He says they assured him that it will remain open indefinitely to produce cars for sale in the West.
The fear was that the plant would be closed when GM begins building the next generation of the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird in St. Therese, Canada, in a year or so. The models are now produced in Van Nuys.
One reason to believe the report that GM will keep the plant open is that, under the UAW contract, if it closes the Van Nuys plant and moves the work to Canada, it must pay the Van Nuys workers their regular salaries until they get a comparable job or retire.
A GM spokesman in Detroit said, “We cannot confirm or deny his (Lee’s) statement.” But GM Vice President Al Warren said, “In recent talks with the union we reaffirmed our intention to find a product for the Van Nuys plant.”
If Lee has been misled into mistakenly believing that a final decision has been made to keep the plant open, it would badly damage hopes of both the UAW and GM to continue implementing the cooperative system.
Fundamental to the concept of cooperation is trust, and deceiving Lee would poison that trust--because he is is one of the UAW’s strongest advocates of labor-management cooperation.
He helped create a successful cooperative system for New United Motors, a Toyota-General Motors joint venture in Fremont.
Lee may have picked this time to disclose the promise he feels he has from GM because of the bitter election fight for the presidency of UAW Local 645 in Van Nuys.
It is unlikely that Lee himself is deceiving the workers to help swing the election because he would be jeopardizing his future as a UAW official. He faces reelection next year, and if the plant is closed by then, such a trick would have been exposed.
Pete Beltran, a harsh critic of the team concept and of cooperation between union and management, is running against the incumbent president, Jerry Shrieves, who also supports cooperation.
Shrieves says his campaign has been based on a non-adversarial relationship with management. He believes that approach has the best chance of saving the jobs in Van Nuys and improving the workers’ lives there and throughout GM’s operations.
Beltran says GM management is just not trustworthy enough for workers to believe what it says. He also charges that the promise to share power with workers has never been implemented, and “my concern is for the rights of the workers, not corporate executives who recently helped themselves to major increases in their retirement pay.”
Lee’s report on the future of the 43-year-old plant will bring sighs of relief to the 3,500 workers--if they believe it--since their jobs have appeared to be on the chopping block for years.
Why hasn’t GM confirmed the Van Nuys report? Possibly because it is going into negotiations for a new national contract with the UAW, and a key issue is the union’s demand for job security.
An early company promise to keep a specific plant open might be seen as a wedge that the union can use to push for a similar promise for all GM plants.
By confirming Lee’s report, the company would give a much-needed boost to the joint effort of the union and GM to speed progress toward full labor-management cooperation in Van Nuys, where the effort is admittedly still moving slowly two years after it began.
Longstanding uncertainty about the future of their good-paying jobs is one reason for the slow progress.
It is difficult to work as a team when you and your co-workers may be dumped at any moment by your “teammates,” the corporate executives in Detroit.
Also, regardless of job security, progress toward a fully operating team system has almost always been slow.
It isn’t easy to get foremen and supervisors to treat workers as equals instead of simply issuing orders to them in the traditional authoritarian manner.
It is not easy, either, for workers to begin sharing the decision-making process--and taking equal responsibility for the results of those decisions.
The election of Shrieves would be a clear signal that the workers at Van Nuys want to continue trying to make the cooperative team system succeed.
A Beltran victory would indicate the system is in for trouble there and perhaps at other GM plants.
Obviously, it is up to the workers to send the signal.
But, whoever wins, it would be a terrible mistake for the UAW and GM to let the outcome deter them from pressing on with their effort to share power in the workplace.
