UAW Leader Backs Clinton on Trade Issue : Labor: Union’s outgoing president urges rank-and-file at Anaheim convention to support battle to get Japan to open its automotive marketplace.

The outgoing president of the United Auto Workers union urged his constituents Sunday to mobilize behind the Clinton Administration in the dispute with Japan over auto trade.

“Brothers and sisters, the president is exactly right when he says that one-way trade is not free trade at all,” Owen Bieber said at the opening session of the union’s triennial convention.

The Clinton Administration has threatened to impose 100% tariffs on a total of $5.9 billion of Japanese-made luxury cars unless that country opens its auto market some more to U.S. cars and car parts.

Both countries remain adamant in the dispute. Japan has filed a complaint with the new World Trade Organization, protesting the sanctions scheduled to take effect June 28.

The United States plans to file its own complaint, challenging Japan’s barriers to automotive trade, which accounts for almost 60% of America’s nearly $66-billion trade deficit with Japan.

Bieber, 65, who is retiring as head of the union after 12 years, is expected to be succeeded by Stephen P. Yokich, a UAW vice president and head of the union’s General Motors department. Yokich is expected to be elected Wednesday.

Bieber has led the UAW through its toughest period. Domestic auto makers, battling recession and relentless competition from Japan, closed plants and eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs during his tenure.

The UAW’s membership has shrunk in size by about half since 1979.

UAW officials said Sunday that the union’s dues-paying membership has grown to 826,000, up from the 1994 average of about 766,000. The increase reflects hiring at the Big Three auto makers in the past year, as a robust market for new cars and trucks has pushed them to boost production levels.

But the union has had little success organizing U.S. auto plants owned by foreign companies.

Yokich, 59, has said that organizing the “transplant” factories will continue to be a UAW priority, along with independent auto parts supplier companies.

“You can’t go to GM, Chrysler and Ford forever and say you have to accept the same contract if maybe 30% of the industry is outside the union,” said Sean McAlinden, a labor expert at the University of Michigan. “Yokich has to find some sort of solution on that.”

The U.S. economy may make that task more difficult.

“We’re heading into a downturn. Union power declines dramatically in any kind of a downturn,” McAlinden said.

Other challenges faced by the union include finding a way to settle a bitter, year-old strike at Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, Ill. The heavy equipment maker has managed to keep its plants running and make improving profits, in part by using replacement workers for the UAW members who have been on picket lines since last June.

The union also must evolve to serve a population of members that will change dramatically over the next few years as more than half its workers at the Big Three retire. Their successors will have more education and different expectations, and many will be from a younger generation.

The present leadership represents the last from the era of Walter Reuther, the UAW leader who built the union into a powerful force during his presidency, from 1946 until 1970 when he died in a plane crash.