By Dale Russakoff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 15, 2006; A01

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.

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."

Gettelfinger uses his own voice sparingly. A relative unknown who likes it that way, he declined to be interviewed for this report. A union media guide, with multi-page biographies of all vice presidents, has only three short paragraphs on Gettelfinger, with one personal detail: He "is proud to be called a chassis line repairman," his last job on the factory line. A fuller biography was written for Gettelfinger, but he rejected it, according to an aide.

Gettelfinger is the first UAW president whose formative experiences almost all came during the decline of the U.S. auto industry. He took his place on an assembly line in Ford's Louisville plant in 1964, when the seeds of the Big Three's downfall had already been planted.

The American auto industry had the U.S. market to itself, with practically no foreign competition. The UAW leader, Reuther, was a confidant of presidents. Its contracts moved the U.S. economy. Its political clout helped shape the national agenda, from civil rights to Medicare to presidential elections.

Gettelfinger rose to prominence in the 1970s telling disbelieving brethren that the party was over. The 1973 Arab oil embargo had struck, and the Louisville plant was making the gas-guzzling Crown Victoria, which got about 12 miles a gallon. But gas mileage was not the half of it. The quality of the plant's work was disastrous because, according to retired workers and managers, the two sides were virtually at war. Ford insiders called the plant "Lousyville."

"They treated us like dogs, said Ed Hardesty, a retired contemporary of Gettelfinger's. "And you would think: How could I get back at them?"

Absenteeism was off the charts, said Tom Ryan, a retired Ford executive who then oversaw human resources in Louisville. "Those were the days when they said, 'Never buy a car made on Monday or Friday because that's when most people were out of work,' " Ryan said.

Ford didn't pay a price for poor quality in the 1960s, said Rodney Thompson, a retired supervisor in Louisville, because there were no foreign competitors for customers to bolt to. And the union didn't mind because if cars came back for repairs, that created more jobs -- and repair jobs were more desirable than line jobs.

"Looking back 50 years, throughout the industry, both the management and the union colluded in greed," said John Casesa, the dean of Wall Street auto industry analysts until his retirement this year.

As Ryan recalled, The reward process was all backward. The punishment came when plants started closing. It was a question now of survival."

Louisville was high on Ford's hit list, and Hardesty said he and many others in the union deemed it a scare tactic. But Gettelfinger -- newly elected as bargaining chairman in 1978 -- took it seriously, joining UAW and plant officials to persuade Ford to give them six months to turn the situation around.

"Ron saw down the road before most of us," said Hardesty, who was initially a skeptic. "We both had to change or we wouldn't have a future."

Gettelfinger opened an era of cooperation with new managers, convincing fellow workers that their jobs were riding on it.

He let it be known that workers no longer could count on him to intercede in their defense if they were routinely absent or doing sloppy work. He also presented plant managers with lists of workers' complaints, which, to their surprise, were rectified. Absenteeism plunged and quality improved to the point where Louisville got the nod to make the new Ford Ranger in the early 1980s.

"He was receptive to doing things much differently than was done in the past and encouraging people to participate, stop the fighting, the distrust," Ryan said. "It was a huge political risk."

Hardesty remembered thinking at first that Gettelfinger was insufficiently "hard core," but he said he changed his mind when he watched him negotiate contracts with management. "I've seen him turn so angry his ears were almost bleeding," Hardesty said. "He was hard on the company and hard on the people who served under him, too. He told it like it was."

Gettelfinger rose in 1992 to become UAW regional director in Indiana, just in time to confront the beginning of the collapse of the U.S. auto parts industry, which now is playing out in the bankruptcy cases of Delphi Corp. and five other major U.S. parts makers. Battered by competition from low-wage suppliers overseas, the Big Three were spinning off their parts divisions, which had been notorious for waste.

John Messer, then an aide to Gettelfinger, said GM spinoff Magnequench Inc., a magnet manufacturer, was paying workers $57,000 a year. In China, the work cost $3,000.

In rapid succession, the companies closed their Indiana plants and moved overseas. "Delco Remy, Magnequench, Oxford Automotive, Wellman Therman, Noblesville Casting -- I closed five plants and it was a heartbreak," Messer said. "Ron was with me, with men and women 55 to 60 years old, just looking at you saying, 'What am I going to do?' Those folks couldn't draw any retirement until they were 65 years old."

Messer said he and Gettelfinger worked 16- to 20-hour days negotiating settlements and buyouts for workers in the plants. "It was a market game, a money game, a global game, and our workers lost," he said.

Messer said the lessons of Indiana influenced Gettelfinger as UAW vice president when Ford executives found him strikingly hard-line in 1999 contract negotiations. Now Ford wanted to spin off its parts division, but Gettelfinger insisted, under threat of a strike, that the workers remain on Ford's payroll. The new parts company, Visteon Corp., would have to lease them from Ford. If Visteon failed, as its union plants later did, their jobs and wages would be safe.

"He was more adversarial than I'd ever known him," said Ryan, the Ford executive who knew Gettelfinger from Louisville.

The protections bought Visteon workers security that their Delphi counterparts are struggling to win back in bankruptcy court. But the high-price contract is one of many contributors to the financial crisis at Ford that Gettelfinger, as UAW president, will have to confront in next year's contract talks.

It is conventional wisdom that Gettelfinger has the hardest job in Detroit. Ford and GM are in the process of eliminating 60,000 union jobs. When the 2007 contracts come up, and the companies seek more concessions, analysts say he will have to turn back to retirees, whose costs amount to about $1,500 per car made in the United States. But retirees outnumber active workers about 2-to-1 in the UAW, so asking them to take cuts is the equivalent of voting to cut Social Security in a congressional district where everyone is over 65.

And while the union has cushioned the blow of job loss for senior workers, their younger counterparts have no expectation of a soft landing. Unable to organize booming Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai plants, the union remains locked in the shrinking, American sector of the U.S. market; its membership has plunged from a peak of 1.5 million in the 1970s to 557,000 last year, according to its annual report to the Labor Department.

A rising dissident movement says Gettelfinger is responsible. "Every concession by UAW drives the race to the bottom and gives less reason for workers at Nissan and Toyota to join the union," said Mike Parker, a Chrysler Group electrician elected as a delegate to next month's convention. "To organize them, the UAW has to stand for something. If we're partners with the company, we'd be like another boss, another person controlling their lives."

"There will be a widely held view in the short-term that Ron is responsible for the decline of the union, but that clearly isn't true," said Peter J. Pestillo, a former Ford vice chairman and Visteon chairman who negotiated often opposite Gettelfinger. "The real story is that the Americans couldn't succeed in the marketplace. It was a systemic failure that we couldn't conceal any longer."