• In this Issue >
  • Features
    • From the President
    • Is that a FLEX-FUEL you're driving?
    • Devastating news
    • Face time
    • UAW legislative priorities for 2006
    • UAW delegates meet with congressman
    • Workers Memorial Day
    • The Dangers below
    • Connecting dots, to Delphi’s Miller
    • Life on Line
  • Union Front
    • Company postpones filing court motions
    • Workers authorize strike
    • Anti-union group grasping at straws
    • Dana workers choose the UAW
    • Election results may be key to passage
    • Member minute
    • Organizing Roundup
  • Departments
    • From the Readers
    • Just the Facts
    • World of Work
    • UAW 101
    • Safer Work
    • Still Solid
    • Skilled Trades
    • Workers' Words
    • Solidarity Index / Past Issues

Photo:RICK REINHARD

If it weren’t for those (contract) safeguards, they’d be closing plants tomorrow.

Jeff Washington, Local 900 president

President Ron Gettelfinger speaks to Ford retirees in Florida.

Devastating news

Ford workers face uncertain future

The UAW workers at Ford Motor Co. uneasily awaited the Jan. 23 announcement of the company’s “Way Forward” reorganization plan.

What the thousands of hard-working men and women at Ford heard was disappointing.

Ford’s plan includes closing up to 14 facilities and shedding up to 30,000 hourly and salaried workers over the next six years – but it names only a few specific locations that are threatened.

“Like the 2002 plan, Ford’s new ‘Way Forward’ is based on cutting jobs and closing facilities to ‘align’ Ford’s production capacity with shrinking demand for Ford’s vehicles. Then, as now, the focus should be on striving to gain market share in this competitive market by offering consumers innovative and appealing products,” said a joint statement from UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President Gerald Bantom, who directs the union’s National Ford Department.

Union-represented workers affected by the announcement are covered by the job security program and all other provisions and protections of the UAW-Ford National Agreement.

The UAW will rigorously enforce those programs.

“If it weren’t for those safeguards, they’d be closing plants tomorrow. We’re all concerned about the announced changes. It affects all of us,” said Jeff Washington, a member of the 2004 UAW Ford National Negotiating Committee and president of UAW Local 900, which represents workers at Ford’s Michigan Truck, and Wayne Stamping and Assembly plants.

None of those facilities is slated for closing, but with more threatened workplaces yet to be named, all Ford workers are uneasy about their futures.

“The announcement has further left a cloud hanging over the entire workforce because of pending future announcements of additional facilities to be closed at some point in the future,” said Gettelfinger and Bantom.

The UAW will not just accept Ford’s proposals and will continue discussions as the union fights for a better future for members. Certainly it makes the 2007 negotiations all the more important.

“I’ve got faith in my union to do the right thing,” said Washington.

Larry Gabriel