By Sholnn Freeman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
The clash over a controversial new labor contract at Chrysler has moved to the factory floor in suburban Michigan, where union officials fanned out this week trying to persuade their members to vote yes.
On the line, Aaron Devers, 47, who works at Sterling Heights Assembly, found himself buttonholed by one of the half-dozen committeemen from the United Auto Workers who were trying to win him over.
"They are saying it's a good contract and it's the best they can get," Devers said. "But everybody thinks it's a bad deal. People are afraid of it." The workers fear that the union is giving up too much without any commitment from Chrysler to keep plants open.
Chrysler and Ford are seeking some of the largest U.S. labor concessions in decades. General Motors workers approved a contract this month, with two-thirds of workers voting favorably. The Chrysler deal has faced opposition almost from the start. The ratification vote, underway at Chrysler union halls throughout the country this week, is expected to end early Saturday.
Like the GM deal, the Chrysler agreement includes an increase in health-care costs for workers and broad changes to union work rules that would create a class of plant workers paid as little as $14 or $15 an hour. Factory workers at Chrysler make about $28 per hour.
Union officials are telling workers that their current salaries and seniority are protected by the new contract, though new hires could be put into the lower-paid categories.
Fear runs deep among Chrysler workers, given the company's turbulent history, including brushes with financial disaster in the late 1970s, when the federal government stepped in with bailout loans, and takeover battles with Kirk Kerkorian, who was eventually fended off.
In the latest chapter, Chrysler was bought by the private-equity group Cerberus Capital Management earlier this year, ending a rocky nine-year pairing with Germany's Daimler-Benz.
"This company has had ups and downs. Its future is unpredictable," said Gerald Meyers, a former auto company chief executive and a management professor at the University of Michigan. "If there is any view, it's a downside view."
Meyers said the union workers don't trust Cerberus.
"The distrust is probably warranted," he said. "It's clear to me and clear to everybody that Cerberus is loaded. They can come up with whatever is necessary, and they don't need concessions."
Voting on the Chrysler contract appears to be at the halfway point, and the outcome remains unclear. The contract covers 45,000 workers at 59 facilities. Yesterday, both sides were awaiting results from Indiana plants. Workers at Local 685 and Local 1166 in Kokomo, Ind., which together have about 6,000 members, rejected the contract last night, according to a report from the Associated Press.
Autoworkers in Sterling Heights and Warren, Mich., two major manufacturing centers, begin voting today, and the balloting there will be watched closely. The plants employ about 9,700 union members, who have been the targets of heavy lobbying.
"It's the intensity of it," said Melvin Thompson, president of UAW Local 140 in Warren. "Our elected officials are on the floor all day answering questions that members may have. We are actually calling people on the phone and urging them to read the contract and vote on it."
He added, "I think we are going to pass it."
Thompson and other union officials have been arguing that the tentative contract is the best deal they could get from Chrysler. Thompson said it protects workers while giving the company room to become more competitive with rivals.
Opponents of the contract include UAW factions that have long criticized union leadership in Detroit for being too willing to bend to corporate demands.
Bill Parker, chairman of the union's Chrysler contract negotiating team, broke with union leadership over the final contract deal. He released a minority report arguing that the contract "undermines years of gains by our union" and urged Chrysler workers to reject it.
At the center of this argument are complaints that while the contract contains big concessions on health care and wages, it has no guarantees that Chrysler will continue to build cars and trucks at U.S. plants or provide jobs at top-tier union wages.
Devers said he peppered the UAW committee official on Monday with questions about the new wage system, zeroing in on fuzzy contract language about "non-core" workers.
A leaflet from opponents of the contract that was being distributed at the plant yesterday described non-core jobs as any that don't involve putting parts on a car. Devers and other workers fear that terms of the contract will allow the company to outsource the jobs or pay the workers $14 per hour.
"There are 3,000 people in this plant. Almost half the jobs are non-core -- maintenance, material handling, underbody in the body shop, paint shop, inspection, people who drive cars off the line," Devers said. "Non-core is an open window. We don't know where it closes."
Devers said he was not planning to vote for the contract and that he did not fear the possibility of Cerberus taking a hard line if rejection meant a new round of negotiations.
"This contract is a hard line," he said.
Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at University of California at Berkeley, said rejection of the contract wouldn't doom the company or the workers.
If the deal collapses, UAW President Ronald A. Gettelfinger will have a number of options. He could seek a new vote within a week. He could renegotiate. He could move on to the Ford deal, which hasn't been negotiated or voted on, and then come back to Chrysler.
"If it passes, both sides will have a loud sigh of relief," Shaiken said. "If it fails, both sides will swallow hard, go back to the table and see what can be addressed in the context of the existing agreement."
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