UAW District Chief Faces Tough Election : Labor: McDonnell layoffs and the GM plant closing give ammunition to an opponent representing dissident members.

With McDonnell Douglas announcing a new round of layoffs in Long Beach and the General Motors plant in Van Nuys set to close in August, the United Auto Workers’ western regional director is facing stiff opposition from dissident members in the union’s elections today.

In the latest round of a long-running feud, Glenn Plunkett, a member of the dissident group New Directions, will seek to oust Bruce Lee, who has headed the UAW’s nine-state Region 6 since 1983. At issue is which strategy--cooperation or competition--will save the most jobs.

Lee, who has the backing of international union officers, maintains that the only way to keep manufacturers competitive and union members employed is to cooperate with management in areas such as work rules and quality control.

Plunkett says such tactics have failed to keep the Van Nuys plant open or stem the flow of aerospace jobs from Southern California.

“The UAW has lost its will to fight,” says Plunkett, a Douglas Aircraft employee. “We’ve cooperated ourselves out of hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

Debate over the correct mix of militancy and accommodation is nothing new for the UAW. But union members and analysts say the divisions may deepen as the hard-pressed union absorbs the fallout of 54,000 GM layoffs and tens of thousands more in the aerospace industry over the next few years.

“Once plants start to close, people are going to see things need to change,” says Jake Flukers, a skilled trades worker at the Van Nuys plant.

UAW membership has declined to 860,000 today from 1.5 million in 1979, while the western region has less than half of the 100,000 members of its peak period in the mid-1970s .

The majority of delegates from Local 645, which represents the Van Nuys workers, has pledged to support Plunkett. The rest of his support comes from Local 148, which represents 19,000 Douglas Aircraft workers in Long Beach.

If all of the delegates vote as they have pledged, Lee will win by a slim 25 votes out of 421. But Plunkett says he expects to win enough delegates to his side to put him over the edge.

The contest for regional director is the culmination of a series of clashes between Lee and the two dissident locals.

Last September during contract negotiations with Douglas Aircraft, Local 148 officials asked UAW President Owen Bieber to exclude Lee from the talks. They charged conflict of interest because he is head of a nonprofit union affiliate that retrains displaced workers.

Lee denies any conflict of interest. In February, he filed a $1-million libel suit in Van Nuys Superior Court against eight members of Local 165 who had distributed flyers accusing him of making money off laid-off workers through the nonprofit firm, the UAW Labor Employment & Training Corp.

Lee dismisses such accusations as crass political maneuvering. He insists that the majority of his membership supports his approach, noting that only two locals out of the nearly 200 plants represented in the western region oppose him.

“Cooperation doesn’t mean coziness or throwing away your rights. Cooperation means building enough trust to get things done for people.”