How Workers Win
Plant by plant and job by job, UAW members are keeping work in-house.

Story by Mike Rosenbaum,
with additional reporting
by Sam Stark

Everyone knows that it’s management’s job to make business decisions, while workers are just supposed to show up every day and follow orders.

The problem is, if you let managers do their job, without getting involved in the nuts and bolts of how your company is run, you might show up one day and find there are no more orders to follow.

These days, unionized companies are more willing than ever to find non-union suppliers and vendors to outsource production or service work.

How do we keep our jobs when management is ready and willing to move them away?

The most comprehensive answer is to build a strong labor movement, both here and abroad, so that executives have fewer places to look when they are searching for a non-union, low-wage haven. The UAW has fought long and hard for union-building measures such as labor law reform, fair trade policies and respect for union rights abroad.

We will be fighting on these issues for a long time to come. But the fight for good jobs and good wages isn’t just global. It’s also local. Every day, UAW members are fighting plant by plant, job by job, to keep work in union shops here in the U.S.A.

Sometimes, we win. And often, we do it by learning to speak management’s language better they can do it themselves.

Agreeing to Disagree
According to Scott Stanton, president of UAW Local 624 at Daimler Chrysler’s New Process Gear facility in Syracuse, N.Y., the fight against outsourcing isn’t always adversarial. Stanton says he maintains “open dialogue with the company.”

“We disagree constantly on outsourcing philosophies,” he says. “We always have and we always will.”

Nonetheless, he says, “We will work with the company, to improve our process so that we make the product as inexpensively as possible and continue to drive the cost of the product down. That’s how you keep work in-house.”

“The entire plant population” is involved in the fight against outsourcing, says J.J. Courcy, a Local 624 committeeman. “We find out a lot about parts that are being outsourced at our union meetings when they bring it up with our stewards and committeemen.”

Mobilizing the entire membership has helped Local 624 save hundreds of jobs, growing from about 2,200 members 10 years ago to 3,600 today.

Recently, Courcy says, “there was a magnesium (transfer case) that they were going to outsource, simply because we had never done magnesium in our plant before.”

Through negotiations, Local 624 demonstrated that its members should perform the work.

“We met with the company,” Courcy explains. “We told them, ‘This could be the future, down the road, the magnesium operation.’ We called a special conference, but we didn’t have to miss one day of work. We were able to secure that business, which is approximately 600 jobs.”

Taking on Tower
Sometimes, union workers have to find a way to make an employer listen. That’s the situation members of UAW Local 3206 in Granite City, Ill., faced last November. Their employer, Tower Automotive, decided to build frames for the new Lincoln Aviator in Monterrey, Mexico. That decision would have cost the jobs of 99 UAW members.

“Corporate restructuring” was the reason the company gave at the time. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, a management memo said, “automotive manufacturers have been forced to adjust quickly to the new economic reality.”

Further, as a result of discussions with Ford Motor Co., Tower decided the frame jobs would be outsourced to reduce Ford’s costs “without deteriorating our own financial performance.”

Local 3206 President Mike Fults recognized the shortsightedness of Tower’s move.

“I knew there was no way we could compete with the low wages they pay workers in Mexico,” he acknowledges. “But Monterrey is 12 hours away from here. We’re less than a half hour across the Mississippi River from Hazelwood, Mo., where the Lincoln Aviator was going to be assembled starting in August. It makes sense to keep the frame jobs in Granite City.”

Fults figured he had 10 days to reverse Tower’s decision, so he got members involved in a campaign that struck in many directions at once. Local 3206 officials stated their case to the media and generated favorable coverage. Tower employees conducted informational pickets outside the plant.

Area politicians voiced their support for the local, while Region 4 Director Dennis Williams and UAW Vice Presidents Ron Gettelfinger and Elizabeth Bunn joined in negotiations with Ford and Tower executives.

After 10 days, Tower officials announced they had recalculated their numbers and decided it was cost effective to build the Aviator frames in Granite City after all.

Continued