Socialist Viewpoint

What’s Good For GM Is Good Enough For UAW Tops

By Charles Walker

Last week auto workers learned that the union’s tops had completed negotiating a new, concession-laden four-year contract with General Motors, Ford and Chrysler and two auto-parts suppliers, Delphi and Visteon. “Jesus, how hard was that?,” some autoworkers must be asking. The new 4-year pact, which still must be ratified by a majority of the 300,0000 autoworkers, allows the Big-Three automakers to reduce their unionized workforce, shut-down plants and replace a wage increase for the first two years with $3,000 signing bonuses, which will keep overtime, sick and vacation earnings calculated at the old base pay. Union negotiators early on promised that they would not accept cuts to health-care benefits, still they agreed to higher co-pays for name brand prescription drugs. They also agreed to accept lower cost-of-living increases. “The complex formula that determines cost-of-living adjustments will also be changed to reduce payments,” reported the New York Times (Sept. 19, 2003).

In return, the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) secured the right to card-check union recognition at Delphi and Visteon, parts suppliers to the Big Three, and at Chrysler’s Mercedes plant in Alabama. That’s good. But the Big Three’s main parts suppliers also gained wage relief, when the negotiators from Solidarity House, the union’s headquarters, agreed to a two-tier wage pact for those plants. That can’t be good news for parts workers, estimated at 100,000, looking to the UAW to raise the industry’s dismal average wage levels.

Although the union’s members haven’t got an official report on the talks, preparatory to a ratification vote, the press and some politicians quickly learned many of the proposed pacts’ details. The New York Times starkly reported that the deals “will result in thousands of job cuts as roughly a dozen plants are closed or shut down.” Moreover, “the concessions…were the most significant since a deep industry recession and a near-bankruptcy at Chrysler prompted the UAW to reopen contracts at GM and Ford in 1982.” Earlier press reports estimated that the union would lose about 50,000 members in these negotiations. Since 1982 the auto union has lost tens of thousands of members, even as the union adds healthcare workers, teaching assistants, writers and the like to its declining numbers.

Over the years, the industry’s ever-rising productivity has allowed the auto bosses to sharply reduce labor costs as ever fewer autoworkers produce ever more vehicles. Further, the union’s concessions haven’t kept the Big Three’s foreign and domestic competitors from gaining a 40 percent share of the U.S. auto market. Still, the union negotiators’ game plan was to reduce further the automakers’ labor costs. Wall Street analysts are questioning whether the proposed pact is enough to help the auto moguls retain what market share they still have. One told the New York Times, “We believe a contract with steep labor concessions is a sign of a troubled core business, not ‘good news’ for investors.”

Undoubtedly, the automakers would like more concessions than they got. Clearly, when the contract runs out, if not before, the Big Three will seek still more concessions and, if the pattern and history of recent decades is any guide, probably will get them. Though younger autoworkers have experienced only concessions bargaining since they entered the auto plants; at some point their anticipated dissatisfaction may disrupt the steady flow of vehicles out of the plants’ gates. Avoiding that development is the tricky part of the auto negotiators’ job. Up to now they’ve managed to pull it off, even as thousands of union jobs were eliminated and auto production was steadily sped up. But the negotiators’ real job of ensuring labor peace in the auto plants doesn’t seem likely to get any easier as industry competition, expected to get only fiercer, pushes the automakers ever deeper into a corner.

The most recent widespread organized autoworker resistance to both the companies and the UAW occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when mainly Black autoworkers in Detroit reacted with work slowdowns and wildcats to racism and being forced to work harder and faster under increasingly unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. The auto bosses retaliated with firings and suspensions, while club-wielding union officials attacked wildcatters. Since then, attempts at grassroots organizing have not caught fire. But it can only be a matter of time, before spontaneous actions erupt and a fresh attempt at rank-and-file mobilizations confront both the corporate and union bureaucracies.

The New York Times labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, wrote that the proposed auto pacts represent a “new labor strategy” (Sept. 20, 2003). He reports that union negotiators now are focusing on keeping their corporate counterparts competitive, “making sure that companies and jobs survive.” But Greenhouse is wrong on both counts. UAW negotiators have long acted as though they were, as Greenhouse put it, “in the same boat as management,” that is, active collaborators with the auto bosses. Furthermore, that collaboration has not meant job security, as the union’s latest membership rolls demonstrate.

However, Greenhouse is right on the mark when he reports that other union tops have shown themselves just as willing as the auto union negotiators to collaborate in propping up corporations’ profits by trimming labor costs. The reporter relates that the Steelworkers Union recently agreed to a three-year wage freeze for 19,000 Goodyear workers. Moreover, the union agreed to the closing of an Alabama plant. The new pact was overwhelmingly ratified by the demobilized and demoralized ranks. The scarier part is that the Steelworkers announced that the Goodyear Corp. deal will be used “as a template” for future industry negotiations.