Auto Workers End Walkout Against GM : Labor: Deal with Ohio UAW local will send 43,000 back to work after crippling strike. Top priority will be resuming production of the Saturn.
Members of a United Auto Workers union local whose strike had crippled dozens of General Motors Corp. plants began returning to work Saturday night at a GM parts factory in Lordstown, Ohio, hours after handily approving a new contract.
The hard-won settlement will return more than 43,000 UAW members to their jobs over the next few days. The top priority will be to resume production of GM’s hot-selling Saturn car.
The UAW appeared to gain a small victory with the strike--seen as a test of wills over GM’s vow to drastically cut the cost of components it buys for its vehicles--by delaying one such cutback and saving 240 jobs.
But the walkout touched off squabbles in the shrinking UAW membership and left plenty for labor and management to argue about. Both sides claimed to have won something.
GM said in a statement that the strike “was unfortunate, but allowed us to resolve a number of key competitive local issues in that plant” without giving up the ability “to meet our competitive challenges.”
Dave Kimmel, president of striking Local 1714 at the Lordstown metal fabrication plant, said GM had agreed to return 240 jobs--the emotional focus of the dispute--to the plant’s tool-and-die shop until at least January, 1994.
But union and company watchers characterized the walkout as an early skirmish that resolved none of the seemingly intractable issues that face the two sides as they head into next year’s national bargaining session.
“This is not the end but the beginning of the talks” on GM giving more work to non-union firms, said Harley Shaiken, a onetime UAW member and an expert on work and technology at UC Berkeley.
About 98% of the 800 voting members of Local 1714 at the Lordstown plant endorsed the new agreement reached early Saturday, 10 days after its 2,600 workers walked out to protest the threatened loss of jobs.
The strikers were immediately called back to the plant’s regular third shift starting at 10:30 p.m. Saturday. Plant officials hoped to operate through the rest of the holiday weekend to try to catch up with lost production that has hamstrung much of GM’s North American system.
The metal-stamping plant makes body panels and parts of auto frames, and the effects of its shutdown quickly spread through GM’s network of about 125 U.S. and Canadian plants and an unknown number of other firms’ plants that sell parts to GM. Analysts cut their estimates of GM’s third-quarter earnings by 10 cents a share due to the strike.
Starting with the Saturn plant in Tennessee, which shut down just hours after the walkout began due to a shortage of parts, the strike eventually closed nine assembly plants and idled 43,000 workers at those facilities.
Dozens of parts plants--including GM’s and those of outside supply firms--that make components for the assembly plants also were affected. GM could not say how many of those plants had to cut back production or how many workers had to be furloughed.
Twenty car and truck nameplates from all six GM automotive divisions had ended production by Friday. Most costly was the shutdown of Saturn, which lost about 6,000 cars to the strike.
The Saturn, a small car built by the new GM division that represents the company’s effort to reinvent itself, including its management-worker relations, has been in short supply for months due to rising demand and the single plant’s slow buildup toward a third work shift. Some dealers were running out of cars as a result of the strike.
“We’re real excited this strike is over,” said Steve Monez, general manager of Saturn of Monrovia. He said he has about 20 cars on hand, but that anyone ordering from the factory today might face a 60- to 90-day wait.
Saturn also figured in a rare public fight during the strike between the president of Saturn’s UAW local, Michael Bennett, and Steven Yokich, the head of the union’s GM department in Detroit, that reflected the pressures on the once-powerful union amid heavy losses in the U.S. auto industry.
Bennett’s UAW local, which entered into a unique joint-management agreement with Saturn that ties part of workers’ pay to profits and gives the union an active role in management, is not viewed favorably by union traditionalists such as Yokich.
Instead of the usual pledge of solidarity with striking workers, Bennett criticized the Lordstown strike and the UAW’s “archaic” ways. That reportedly brought a private rebuke from Yokich and a public broadside from one of his aides.
Analyst Shaiken called the public criticism “almost unprecedented” but said he doubts that Bennett’s views are widespread among UAW members.
“The union may have won a symbolic victory by slowing a specific part of GM’s restructuring plan,” he said. “It served notice that the UAW will not just sit by, that GM will not have a free hand” in its retrenchment.
GM has announced plans to close 21 plants and eliminate 74,000 jobs by 1995. More recently, the world’s largest company has demanded price cuts of up to 30% on the $50 billion in goods it purchases from suppliers annually. Analysts have estimated that nearly half of the UAW’s 80,000 parts-related jobs at GM are jeopardized by this effort.
