The UAW convention was held last week in Las Vegas, a city that attracts people from all over the world looking for a second chance in life. It may have been a fitting venue for a union struggling to pull out of a free-fall in membership, power, and influence. The extensive press coverage generated by the convention showed that the UAW is still considered a force to be reckoned with by those interested in the drift of the US economy. But the reports were mostly about the union’s decline.
The tone of the convention was set by UAW President Ron Gettelfinger when he told the delegates that “…[i]t’s clear today that our challenges are unlike any we’ve faced in the past, largely due to globalization—and severely flawed policies on trade, health care, workers’ rights, taxes, and other crucial issues.”
And what challenges they are:
• Declining membership: a long term decline has recently accelerated: since 2000, the UAW has lost 140,000 members in the auto industry. Planned plant closings by GM, Ford, and Delphi over the next few years will mean another 80.000 UAW jobs lost.
• Difficulty maintaining existing wages and benefits. GM and Ford demanded, and got, mid-contract concessions on health care costs. Now, the entire private welfare system that the UAW fought for, and won, over decades is in danger of being shredded.
• Halting a break down in work rules. A two-tier work force is shaping up in the core auto industry: this week Daimler-Chrysler announced that it would hire hundreds of temporary workers for a planned 1,000 worker third shift at its Belvidere, Illinois plant. The temps would be union members but they would be hired on two year contracts at much lower pay, inferior benefits, and with little job protection.. While temps have long been a problem, this institutionalizes competitive wage competition among different classes of union workers. And Chrysler’s North American division—unlike GM and Ford – is a quite profitable.
• Declining market share for UAW built products. Gross mismanagement by the Big Three that employ most UAW members has created a legacy of poor product design and inferior products. Toda 5 of the top 10 cars sold in the US are produced by a non-US based company.
• An inability to organize the so called transplant companies such as Honda and Toyota. In a slight twist to the normal pattern of globalization, global auto companies have preferred to produce where they sell. Foreign owned “transplants” have opened plants throughout the Sunbelt. More are planned. They remain non-union despite UAW attempts over the years to organize them.
The convention saw plenty of “pro-US” flag waving, but ironically the chief “competition” UAW workers face is non-union American workers, not low wage workers in the developing world. (Although Ford’s recently revealed plans for major investments in Mexican plants may signal a shift.)
President Ron Gettlefinger further underscored the problem when he said:
“This isn’t a cyclical downturn. The kind of challenges we face can’t be ridden out. They’re structural challenges. And they require new and farsighted solutions.”
Yet despite the frank talk, the solutions offered were—with few exceptions—nothing new. The convention pledged to spend more on organizing and more on getting friendly politicians elected. The union also committed itself to fighting important public policy battles for single payer health insurance and changes in labor and bankruptcy laws. These are all good and worthy objectives but they are part of the standard labor repertoire of the last century.
There was one relatively new initiative that could hold promise: the UAW’s program to promote new product development. Gettlefinger touted a new “Marshal Plan” for the automotive industry which would use government economic incentives to promote the development and production of environmentally friendly cars to be built in the US. In a different political climate, one could envision a green equivalent of Walter Reuther’s dramatic call to convert the auto industry to airplane production for World War II.
Stunningly absent from the convention was much talk about the need to build the kinds of global alliances that could successfully confront the global corporations that dominate the auto industry. Because the fact is, that the challenges the UAW faces—and they are monumental—are being faced by auto workers around the world. For instance, just last week, a major German contactor for Daimler-Chrysler announced big lay-offs. In fact, German auto workers have been facing similar challenges to job security and working conditions for years.
An example of the kind of transnational cooperation the UAW could be undertaking is unfolding right now in Europe. Last week, as the Convention was underway in Las Vegas, GM workers at the Azumbuja assembly plant near Lisbon in Portugal staged a strike and conducted other actions to protest GM’s demand for concessions to the keep the plant open. (It is important to note, that while Portuguese auto worker are relatively low paid compared to US or German workers, GM is still demanding concessions.) The response across Europe by GM workers was immediate: overtime bans and job actions began not only in GM’s other Portuguese plants but – significantly – in plants in Spain and Germany. According to the Financial Times (6/20), widespread shortages of parts forced production slow-downs and also required GM to institute costly airlifts of parts around Europe to keep plants running.
The Financial Times writes:
Workers at most of GM’s European factories have agreed to support the 1,100 who face losing their jobs from the expected closure of the Azumbuja plant. Unions fear the factory will be the first of many to close and accuse the company of planning to shift production to eastern Europe and Asia. The company denies such plans.....
GM said an overtime ban at Kaiserslautern contributed to parts shortages caused by holidays on Thursday and Friday and worker taking time off to attend football World Cup parties.
Karl Franz, who is co-coordinating the action as head of GM’s European Employee Forum, said the knock-on effects of the shortages were a warning to GM of the damage that more serious industrial action could have.
If the UAW is to survive, it must establish mutual aid with auto workers in the rest of the world. A good follow-up to the convention would be to offer help to the Europeans—and not just a letter of support—but active, material support. This could jump start the creation of the kind of strong global alliances with other unions and allies that are necessary to resist the global corporate attack on wages and working conditions by global auto companies.
Such alliances must fight for new international agreements to reduce the kind of corporate mobility that permits the blackmailing workers and communities with the threat of plant closings. And these agreements can only be won be strong alliances that are built into the fabric of the union at all levels. Once in place, global alliances and global agreements could make it possible to develop a labor alternative for the big questions that face the international auto industry and its workers.
For more see our previous blog Big Trouble for Auto Workers by clicking on Organizing on the menu to the right.
M.O.
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Posted by: qualityg | July 09, 2006 at 02:09 PM