USA * The UAW's Disastrous Bargaining The United Auto Workers union has forced 8,700 Caterpillar workers to end their strike. But it couldn't make them approve the "total flexibility" contract the union has negotiated with management. But UAW leadership's "bargaining relationship" will let Caterpillar's "lean and mean" management get most of what it wants anyway.
by Kim Moody
THE OFFER WAS AN ENDORSEMENT OF WHAT labor relations professor Victor Davinatz calls "Caterpillar's three-and-a-half-year commitment to restructuring its relationship with the UAW and freeing itself from the union's penchant for pattern bargaining."
As the Wall Street Journal put it, the major theme of this restructured relationship is, "Management is in control." They will now attempt to control the shop floor and implement total flexibility to a degree they couldn't have dreamed of under employee participation.
The agreement, which 78% of strikers refused to approve, would have carved this new regime into stone for the next six years. Management will unilaterally implement much of the contract anyway. TERMS OF SURRENDER
A look at the defeated contract shows that the issues go far beyond the deep economic concessions it contained. As Larry Solomon, president of UAW Local 751 in Decatur, Illinois, says, it "dismantles representation in the plant."
The plant bargaining committee would be cut by half, with no full-time representatives and no stewards at all in some areas of some plants. The remaining representatives have to get company passes to do grievance work. Further, there are restrictions on the amount of company time the union can use to write, investigate, and negotiate grievances. The number of arbitrations is reduced.
Perhaps most outrageous, the company would have the right to unilaterally reject grievances it regarded as "repetitive" or "frivolous"; there would be no appeal. To enhance in-plant competition among workers, the union's own bargaining structure would be reorganized along the lines of new "business units."
A "Temporary Special Moratoria" on free speech would ban use of the word "scab" and bar workers from in any way harassing scabs. Nor would they be able to wear apparel with anti-CAT slogans. To head off future in-plant actions, the no-strike clause would be amended to ban about every form of "concerted" activity once guaranteed by U.S. labor law.
In case all of this is not enough to teach the workers who is boss, UAW leaders have agreed that the 150 strikers who were fired for alleged picket line militancy will be denied arbitration.
As if to mock their own pretensions to labor-management cooperation, the settlement would have made participation in employee-involvement groups a mandatory condition of employment. LEAN OR JUST MEAN?
The settlement swallowed every piece of "flexible" work organization Caterpillar wanted: permanent two-tier wage and benefit structure for new hires; 12-hour alternative work schedules that are "voluntary, if possible"; a part-time or temporary workforce amounting to 15% of total employment; nonunion employees doing bargaining unit work; more company authority over job reassignments; and the downsizing of the workforce as people leave or retire.
Most of the economic features are similarly lean and mean. Over the next six years, the company would take $1.50 off the cost of living allowance. The medical plan would restrict workers to companypicked doctors and hospitals; they would have to pay 300% more to go elsewhere.
The one thing that was in the settlement for the union was the union security clause, making everyone — scab or striker - a dues-paying UAW member. In the eyes of the International union, this union security clause defines the union's relationship to management. And what hovers over the history of this long fight as a theme is the UAW leadership's continued effort to treat Caterpillar like a normal bargaining partner.
Even in the face of a company-written proposal and an overwhelming rejection, the UAW leadership will continue negotiating in what it thinks is a "bargaining relationship." Perhaps the legacy of the oneKim Moody is editor of Labor Notes, a monthly bulletin for the left in the American labor movement. This article is reprinted from the March issue of Labor Notes.
International Viewpoint n° 276 31
* USA way labor-management cooperation efforts embraced by the UAW for the past decade contributed to the International's indecisiveness in this prolonged conflict.
For whatever reason, it is clear that from the start that the UAW was never willing to take off the gloves in what management saw as a bare-knuckle fight from day one.
The first strike from November 1991 through April 1992 seemed designed to avoid angering management. It began when avoid angering management. It began when the company had nine months of inventory [stocks]. Bill Casstevens, who was in charge for the International UAW, actually negotiated with the company to let them produce parts, thus building up inventory even more.
Casstevens was so in love with his former bargaining partner he tried to "kill 'em with kindness, " says Larry Solomon. The company, of course, greeted this weakness with the announcement it would hire permanent replacements. The International collapsed before this threat and ordered members back to work. PUBLIC RELATIONS
The in-plant campaign that followed the first strike was an on-again-off-again affair. Most big actions were directed from UAW headquarters in Detroit. Jerry Tucker, a former UAW regional director who pioneered the inside strategy in the 1980s, explained why the Caterpillar campaign didn't work. "You can't run an in-plant strategy by remote control," he said. "It has to depend on the workers' own selforganization and creativity. And it must be meant to hurt." Many Caterpillar workers demonstrated such creativity, when given their head. But the overall conduct of the fight was confused
In the midst of this would-be campaign, the International hired Greer, Margolis, Mitchell, Burns & Associates (GMMB&A) to advise them on strategy. This Public Relations firm, which masterminded Bill Clinton's 1992 media campaign, has worked for other unions. But it is still a PR firm, not a consultant in strike strategy.
GMMB&A advised the union to drop its "war zone" rhetoric and appeal to the general public — as though CAT, which doesn't sell much to the general public, would be impressed. Playing on the theme of bargaining versus conflict, the firm told the UAW that its strategy "is not designed to help bring the company to its knees; it is designed to bring it to its senses."
Caterpillar's business sense, however, told them to ignore such appeals and go for the cost-cutting reorganization its competitors like Komatsu were pursuing. In any case. PR could not beat raw power. any case, k could not beat raw power.
32 International Viewpoint April 1996
The renewal of the strike in June 1994 was an inadvertent admission that the union's in-plant strategy hadn't worked. While the renewed strike targeted most of CAT's operations, there was little innovation or creativity in the union's strike tactics. If the line-crossing was large, it was The Rise and Fall (?) of at least in part due to the confused messages the International had sent over the last several years. ON THE PROWL