Douglas Workers on Job Without Contract

After overwhelmingly rejecting a new labor contract in a fractious meeting Sunday, workers at McDonnell Douglas Corp.’s Douglas Aircraft division in Long Beach began working without a contract Monday.

The proposed contract, covering 20,000 workers, was endorsed by regional officials of the 900,000-member United Auto Workers but was bitterly attacked by some leaders of UAW Local 148, which represents the Douglas Aircraft workers.

No new formal negotiations were scheduled Monday. Key issues to be resolved include worker demands for annual lump-sum bonuses and objections to company-proposed changes in overtime and job classification procedures.

The Douglas workers, who do final assembly work on McDonnell Douglas’ MD-80 and MD-11 commercial jetliners and build the C-17 military cargo plane, make about $15.50 an hour under the old contract, which expired at midnight Monday.

Urgency surrounding the contract dispute is lessened by the fact that leaders of Local 148 had promised management and their members for weeks that the union would continue to work without a contract rather than take members out on strike if the old contract expired before a settlement was reached.

That pledge made it easier for workers to reject ratification of McDonnell Douglas’ four-year offer by a 7-1 margin Sunday in a meeting attended by an estimated 10,000 union members at Veterans Stadium in Long Beach.

The no-strike promise was an illustration of how fearful unions have become of striking, both for the risk of being replaced and of permanently crippling an economically weak employer.

Douglas and its corporate parent are hurting. About 14,000 employees were laid off last year throughout McDonnell Douglas, 5,400 of them from Douglas Aircraft. In addition, McDonnell Douglas recently all but ruled out Long Beach as a site for its MD-12X commercial jet, a stretch version of the MD-11.

In bargaining for a new contract, union leaders said they wanted terms as lucrative as McDonnell Douglas’ cash-rich competitor, Boeing Co., gave its machinists in late 1989.

The Boeing contract, which came after a seven-week strike, included modest annual raises of between 3% and 4% a year, but also featured lucrative end-of-the-year cash bonuses of between 4% and 10% of a worker’s annual income.

The tentative four-year contract submitted to Douglas workers offered two annual raises of 3% and two more of 4%--but no bonuses except for a 4% lump-sum payment in 1992.

Contracts negotiated during the past year by unions at Lockheed Corp., General Dynamics Corp. and McDonnell Douglas’ jet fighter plant in St. Louis all failed to match the terms of the Boeing contract, making it doubtful that the UAW would be able to cut the same kind of deal at Douglas.

Don Hanson, a spokesman for McDonnell Douglas, said corporate officials “were certainly disappointed” with the contract rejection.

“We presented what we felt was the best offer the company could make,” he said. “We now need to understand what happened” at Sunday’s union meeting.

The contract rejection revealed a union leadership split.

Douglas and UAW officials announced last Wednesday that they had reached tentative agreement on a new contract during meetings in Palm Springs. That pact also included 2,100 other UAW members at McDonnell Douglas facilities in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Bruce Lee, western regional director of the UAW, supported the tentative agreement. But four of seven members of Local 148 who sat with Lee on the union negotiating team recommended rejection. So did Local 148’s president, Richard Rios, who is a member of a small national group of UAW members who call themselves “New Directions” and have complained that the UAW in recent years has been too willing to make contract concessions and should drive a harder bargain.

Steve Burke, an aide to Rios, said the proposal contained too many “take-aways.” He said Lee and other UAW executives tried to “tell us what’s good for us (but) we don’t need mommy and daddy to tell us what time to eat.”

He said the rank and file’s rejection of the contract Sunday vindicated his criticism.

Lee was unavailable for comment.