Union Leader Presides Over Painful Changes

United Auto Workers' Gettelfinger Navigates Job Cuts, Concessions

At a time of maximum uncertainty over their future, the United Auto Workers union will gather next month to re-elect its president. Oddly enough, some of his most enthusiastic supporters are the top executives of the U.S. auto industry.

An ardent, lifelong trade unionist, Ron Gettelfinger, 61, has presided over an era of unprecedented concessions to the Detroit automakers, telling his members that the alternative is for the companies and the union to go down together.

"The companies know that whatever lies before them is vastly worse if something happens to Gettelfinger," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), the industry's champion in Congress. "They're all teetering at the precipice together."

The man trying to negotiate a future for the imperiled union emerges from experiences vastly different from those of his predecessors. He was raised as one of 12 children on a farm in rural Indiana and is the first UAW president to rise from a plant outside Michigan, the industry headquarters. He is also the first with a college degree (a bachelor's in accounting from Indiana University).

Gettelfinger has a farmer's work ethic and expects the same of his colleagues. As president of his Louisville local in the 1980s, he called surprise staff meetings at 6 a.m. and took roll call. Those who were late got "the speech," which fellow union officer Bob Hatfield still can recite verbatim, in Gettelfinger's country twang: "Your people are here every morning at 6. You don't work for me and I don't work for Ford. We work for those people out there. When you ran for that office you didn't tell those people you'd only represent them half the time."

Gettelfinger is outspoken at auto and union conferences about his view that job losses from globalization are the "result of conscious choices by government and corporate policymakers." But unlike other big-union leaders, he rarely comes to Washington to press his policy agenda, which includes national health insurance, tougher trade laws, government support for domestic production of energy-saving vehicles and protections for workers in corporate bankruptcies. He is not likely to get much of that from the Bush White House.

Sometimes called the "chaplain of the UAW," he is a devout Catholic who does not drink, smoke, gamble or kiss women, even on the cheek, other than his wife Judy. He tried but failed to have the UAW convention moved from the gambling mecca of Las Vegas, and is expected to be elected to a second four-year term there next month.

Changing Mission

Gettelfinger was chosen for the presidency in 2002 by the same administrative caucus that has controlled the union since the days of its legendary president, Walter Reuther. But if Reuther's UAW ushered blue-collar workers into the middle class by forcing Detroit to share the wealth, the Gettelfinger UAW is fighting to keep them from being unceremoniously ushered out.

Under Gettelfinger, the UAW has negotiated generous buyouts and retirement packages for senior employees of Ford and General Motors. Gettelfinger has also steered major concessions through an often angry and demoralized membership. It was he who made the case last fall that Ford and GM had to cut previously sacrosanct retiree health benefits and cancel a pay raise. It is his UAW that agreed to relax work rules and shorten break times in the name of keeping certain plants open. And, in the face of increasingly vocal dissidents who say he is selling out the union legacy, it will be his job to hold the rank and file together next year when the Big Three contracts expire and even bigger concessions are on the table.

"My generation put our bodies on the line and our jobs on the line, but this is different," said Douglas Fraser, UAW president from 1977 to 1983 and a former administrative assistant to Reuther. "This is more difficult than any of the times we went through."

To those who say the UAW is becoming irrelevant, Gettelfinger says the grim outlook only magnifies the union's importance.

"Look at WorldCom or Tyco or Enron," he said recently on Paul W. Smith's radio show in Detroit. "Don't you think those people wish they had a check and balance with their employer? That's really what a union is. Look at the people at Delphi," the troubled auto-parts supplier trying to void union contracts and slash pay in bankruptcy court. "Without a union, they would be helpless. They wouldn't have any voice at all."