Profits Up, Concessions Demanded
RONNIE?
The new "activist" leadership of the AFL-CIO trade union confederation, elected in November 1995, has been a disapointment. Dianne Feeley* reviews 1996, a year of promises more easily made than kept.
In his victory speech, John Sweeney, the new AFL-CIO President, promised to double the resources allocated to organizing the unorganized 90% of the workforce. While never a rebel, Sweeney was nonetheless president of the fast growing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) SEIU has organized low-wage workers, who are overwhelmingly women and people of color, utilizing unconventional and militant tactics in order to win union recognition.'
A year later, it seems that promises were more easily made than kept. While the new officers have been more visible at rallies and on the picket lines than their predecessors, they certainly aren't prepared for a head-on confrontation with corporate America. Last year workers won, at best, small benefits and managed to preserve their union in the face of outright union busting. But often the unions ended up compromising over work rules and future security for themselves and the new generation of workers. The union leadership didn't raise the fundamental issue of job creation. Although the Canadian Auto Workers, just across the border, provided an alternative model in their negotiations with Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Auto Workers Face Outsourcing
One strike stands out as illustrating Power in the union?
Two of the most important strikes settled in 1996 were defeats for the workers concerned
• Bridgestone-Firestone steelworkers settled a 27-month strike in November. While preserving their union and winning a forty cents an hour wage increase, they agreed to twelve-hour work shifts and continuous plant operation.
Although the tire company backed down from its demands to make employees pay part of their health benefits and to base wage increases on productivity,
Bridgestone- Firestone was able to enforce enough changes to increase productivity.
THE HAT I LIKE,
THE BOOTS HELP...
BUT MAYISE WE NEED
A LITTLE MORE
THIRD WORLD BLOOD.. BOM
BAGHDAD OVER
labor's potential in a world of lean production and just-in-time delivery. Three thousand autoworkers, represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW), in two auto break plants in Dayton, Ohio struck General Motors last March. The seventeen-day strike crippled the auto giant's North American operations, idling more than 178,000 workers. While technically over health and safety issues — which are strikeable issues under the local contract — it was really about outsourcing (subcontracting work to nonunionized, low wage companies) • A 99-day strike at weapons maker McDonnell Douglass ended with workers giving up their demand for guaranteed job security. They also agreed to give up a number of job classifications and work in teams. The company agreed to announce its intentions to outsource work (giving the union sixty days to submit a bid to do the work more cheaply), to pay workers who lose their jobs due to outsourcing their regular wage for up to six months and retrain them for a new job. Since the majority of the work force at McDonnell Douglass is close to retirement age, a significant sweetener was the company offer to increase their spending on the company pension plan by 24%.* [DF]
USA * JERKE
Dayton was the eighth strike against GM since 1994, and like the earlier ones, the settlement required GM to hire more workers? Clearly the union had a powerful weapon in its hands. The strike was national news and the power of the workers to shut down production stood in stark contrast to other, more isolated labor actions.
GM didn't settle after a few days—its previous strategy-but prolonged the strike and challenged the right of workers laid off due to the strike from receiving unemployment benefits. (These benefits are paid by individual states from funds each employer contributes. The states ultimately denied GM's challenge, but GM's action held up payment.) GM, sitting on $12 billion in cash and a 30-day inventory of its hot selling minivans and trucks, wanted to teach workers and their union leadership that it was not going to put up with such strikes. The strike ended up costing GM $900 million.
Outsourcing is a matter of principle for GM and other multinationals because it is a mechanism whereby work from union shops is transferred to non-union ones, thus cutting labor costs significantly. That is, "lean and production is based on a two- or three-tiered production system, with the lower tier being the parts supplier industry. (Although parts plants were once a union bastion, today only one out of every ten parts workers is a union member.) * Dianne Feeley is an editor of Against the Current and a member of the revolutionary socialist group, Solidarity, in Detroit. She was arrested during the newspaper strike at the Port Huron action against USA Today.
February 1997 #285 13
* USA
The UAW leadership seem to have gotten GM's message. It placed no emphasis at its 1996 bargaining convention on an aggressive campaign against outsourcing. In exchange for a continuation of concessionera bargaining, the union won a few benefits (a $2,000 signing bonus, 3% wage increases for the last two years of the three-year contract, $1,000 a year toward tuition for each child a member has in college, and for pensioners, a lump sum inflation protection based on cost-of-living increases). The pattern agreement, now signed by Chrysler, Ford and General Motors, continues a two-tier work force, with new hires beginning at 70% of full pay and taking three years to reach the standard. Health care benefits, which kick in only in the ninth month of work, are limited, under the new contract, to an inferior health care package for the first two years.
Although the UAW went into negotiations declaring job security was its first priority, the pattern agreement reached contains loopholes wide enough to allow the companies to do as they will. But the biggest problem has always been whatever the agreement, the companies don't abide by it and the UAW doesn't insist.
In fact outsourcing language in the con-