UAW's Sacrifices Look to Some Like Surrender

General Motors electrician Brian Thorne talks about the new bailout plan for U.S. automakers outside a plant in Parma, Ohio. The deal urges reduced pay rates. (By Jason Miller -- Associated Press)

Historians date many of the union's problems to the arrival in the United States of foreign auto plants -- the ones they are now being leveled with -- in the early '80s.

Workers at those plants received less in wages, benefits and jobs protection. But when the United Auto Workers tried to organize there, they failed.

Some of that has been blamed on the cultural differences. Most of the new foreign-maker plants emerged in the South.

But even in Marysville, Ohio, where Honda built a plant, the United Auto Workers were unsuccessful.

"That was in their own back yard," said Jonathan Cutler, a professor at Wesleyan University and the author of "Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW and the Struggle for American Unionism." "If you can't organize Ohio, you can't organize your way out of a brown paper bag."

The growth of the foreign-car plants in the United States placed increasing pressure on the domestic automakers and, in turn, the United Auto Workers. The foreign competitors, using nonunion labor, saved money in wages and used that advantage to gain ground on the U.S. automakers.

"When the UAW exposed the Big Three to insurmountable competitive disadvantages, it cut its own throat," Cutler said.

Now, with the bailout loan requiring at least rough parity with the nonunion plants, the union essentially has been forced to capitulate to the nonunion movement.

Getting "down to the level of foreign companies undermines the meaning of having a union in the first place," Montgomery said.

"This is another stage in the defeat of the UAW," said Dan Luria, a former UAW economist and now research director of Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center. "On the other hand, it could have been a lot worse."

Staff writer Steven Mufson contributed to this report.