Roses’ Allure : Despite Boycott Over Plant Closing, GM’s Float Is a Powerful Draw for Auto Workers
Six weeks ago, auto workers voted to boycott the General Motors float in the Rose Parade, angrily ordering their union name off its side to protest the company’s impending closure of the Van Nuys assembly plant.
But they couldn’t stay away.
Alonso Vega, a professional boxer in Mexico City before he became a welder for GM, was fixing small holes in the base of the float, soon to look like a lunar landscape with coverings of seaweed, marigolds and sponge mushrooms.
“The flowers,” the 57-year-old welterweight said in accented English. “The flowers is why I enjoy to do this.”
Mary Jane Burke, whose father helped open the Van Nuys plant in 1947 and who worked there 36 years herself, was one of the volunteers chopping dried yellow and red plant matter so it could be glued to the float like glitter.
“GM was my life,” she said, “the only employer I had.”
Also helping out in the vast warehouse south of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena was John Dominguez, one of the most militant leaders of the United Auto Workers local that withdrew its co-sponsorship of the float after GM announced that the plant will be shut next August. The news has only gotten worse for workers of the nation’s largest company, which disclosed Dec. 18 that it would eliminate 74,000 jobs and shut 21 factories by 1995.
“I’m here because of my son,” Dominguez, a 20-year electrician, insisted a bit sheepishly. “Last year, I told him that if he worked again this year, we’d buy him a (float) jacket. And if a parent makes a commitment. . . .”
To Roger Jackson, a laid-off pipe-fitter, it was no surprise to see leaders of Local 645--”these guys who all griped about this”--arriving with their families to join the festive last-minute work necessary to get a float ready for Wednesday’s parade in Pasadena. A second-generation auto worker, Jackson, 41, thought the boycott ridiculous from the start. It pains him to see the UAW name absent from the float, even blotted off tiny commemorative pins with drops of yellow paint.
“Why should we take our name off the only good thing we got?” he asked. “Why should we let GM take credit for the only good thing we got? Tell me, does that hurt GM?”
“No,” he said. “We should stay till the very end and do what we do. Make something. Do it to the very end.”
It was a worker’s idea to have a float.
That was back in 1987 when GM, reeling from Japanese competition, decided to try the “team concept” in its plants. Asked to serve as a “facilitator” in group meetings in Van Nuys was veteran electrician Dennis Dalrymple, a New Yorker who once served in the Peace Corps and sometimes moonlights as a stand-up comic.
“We were supposed to teach motivation, goal-setting,” recalled Dalrymple, 54, of North Hollywood. “So I set a goal they didn’t expect.”
For several years, his wife had dragged him along to join the legions of volunteers who stick flowers on floats before the Tournament of Roses Parade. He wondered why there was only one union float in the parade, the yearly entry of the Bakers, Confectionery & Tobacco Workers Union: “I said, ‘Why can’t we have a float?’ ”
He got the Rose Queen to visit the plant, then got the UAW international to approve. Finally, he persuaded GM officials in Detroit that a float would bring good publicity for the price of two Super Bowl commercials.
The executives still had to get over one nightmarish scenario: What if GM’s float broke down with the world looking on?
“My answer was that if we can’t make an engine that can go five miles, we don’t deserve to be in the auto industry,” Dalrymple said.
Just in case, the company shipped out two new $10,000 engines, the type that normally go in motor homes. So powered, the GM/UAW float made a flawless debut on New Year’s Day, 1989, winning one of the top prizes.
Since then, GM has gained a reputation for sponsoring some of the most ambitious floats. In 1990, it was a giant robot and, then, a $300,000, 70-foot wizard who pulled a dove from one sleeve, a ringed planet from the other. Both captured the Grand Marshal’s Trophy for excellence in creative design and concept.
This year’s design is the showiest yet--it’s a 90-foot-long “futuristic space exploration vehicle.” Resembling a brontosaurus, it has a long neck that moves not merely up and down, but side to side. Two crew members in the head can maneuver it within a foot of children in the crowd.
“Every year, everybody who works on the float takes pride in it. When it goes by you see tears come to your eyes,” said Linda Cole, a 10-year GM production line worker who volunteered to help the first year, got hooked and now is on the plant’s float committee.
“It’s too bad,” she said, “that politics had to enter something that’s supposed to be so much fun.”
As with most float sponsors, GM hires a professional design firm to build its entry. But the decorating requires a large labor pool and, from the start, GM was a unique source of volunteers, according to Dave Pittman, a supervisor for the contractor, Bent Parade Floats.
“You get lots of people--church groups, high school kids--they’re not used to repetitious work, like cutting silverleaf . . . they lose interest,” Pittman said.
The auto workers, he said, “can do a small part of the job and understand how it fits into the overall look.”
A GM manager, plant communication director Pat Morrissey, heads the float committee. But almost all the workers come from the lunch pail side of the plant and from GM’s subsidiary companies, including Hughes Aircraft. There are so many volunteers that some serve as “petal pushers” for a second float, this year one from the city of Columbus, Ohio.
Several of the UAW officials asked to be assigned to the Ohio project so “we can say we really haven’t been working on the GM float,” said Dominguez, although their spouses and children gravitate to the splashier GM entry.
During debate over the boycott two months ago, Dominguez argued that it was an ideal way to protest GM cutbacks because “we don’t lose anything by not being involved. It doesn’t cost us anything.”
Peter Goelz, who retired in April after 36 years at the plant, was not impressed with the logic. “It stinks,” he said. “On your own time, you can do what you want.”
Goelz is the crew chief of the GM volunteers. A grandfather whose normal hobbies are bowling and fishing, he sounded more like a horticulturist when someone asked what covering they were using for a portion of the float. He rattled off “poppy seeds, onion seeds, yellow clover, white clover, powder rice, crushed rice.”
GM officials had predicted that union members would “join the GM family” when it came time to decorate the float. “It has been an emotional time at the plant,” Morrissey said. “No one knows what will happen after this year.”
By parade time next year, the Van Nuys plant will be closed. Workers who stay with GM will have to move, some to Ste. Therese, Canada, where the company is consolidating production of its Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird lines.
Vega, the former boxer, is convinced this will be his last year pasting on flowers. Having put in 32 years with GM, “I was supposed to be retired a long time ago,” he said.
With the cutbacks, he says, he’ll probably retire to Las Vegas, where he can work in a casino and help train the boxers who flock to that city.
“Maybe they have parades over there, too,” he said.
One man determined not to leave the area is Dennis Dalrymple, the float mastermind. A union activist like Dominguez, he too was working this weekend on the Columbus, Ohio, float.
“We like to participate, but we don’t want to overtly work on the GM float,” he said.
He’s now working on a new union campaign to buy the plant and turn it into a facility to make mass transit vehicles.
“Someone has to make them,” Dalrymple said. “Why not us?”
“It may sound like an impossible dream,” he said. “But wasn’t it an impossible dream that an electrician could get GM and the UAW to enter the Rose Parade?”
