By Phillip Bannowsky
“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?”
called UAW Vice President General Holiefield to hundreds of Chrysler’s Newark
(Delaware) Assembly plant workers. The “General” no doubt expected a resounding
martial response. None came. Maybe nobody in this 2007 special meeting of UAW
Local 1183 workers heard him. I retired from Chrysler in 2001, but I was there.
“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?”
Holifield repeated.
A few titters here and
there—crickets, basically.
What, I wondered, did he expect,
having come basically to shove a s**t sandwich—the two-tier wage structure—down
our throats? New hires would get half-pay indefinitely.
Undeterred, Holiefield continued
his pitch. The global economy was circling the drain. Detroit automakers were
bleeding cash. This was only temporary. It would affect only a special class of
workers, not those on our current jobs.
Having experience in local
collective bargaining, I was inclined to be sympathetic. We were always
squeezed between the rock of a good contract and the hard place of a shut-down.
In the Q and A, I expressed my sympathy but argued that the two-tier violated
UAW principles of solidarity and was contrary to the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Article 23, paragraph 2: “Everyone, without any discrimination, has
the right to equal pay for equal work.”
Turns out that Holliefield did not
exactly abide with that principle when he took the lion’s share of some 3.5
million dollars in bribes doled out to UAW officials by Fiat Chrysler Auto
(FCA) and laundered through the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center (NTC). Since
the capitulation, the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) was serving
itself up ever move lavish vacations and gifts with union funds.
Now ten UAW officials, including
two former presidents, have been sentenced for corruption, and the Union barely
escaped a federal take-over by signing a consent
decree (CD) agreeing to a membership-wide referendum on whether to continue
electing our national leadership by convention delegates or do it by an
all-member one-person-one-vote (1P1V) system. Essentially, claim advocates of
1P1V, “To stifle dissent, the AC has bribed, pressured and intimidated
convention delegates and their locals to force them to vote for their
candidates.”
I am not inclined to doubt it.
UAW members should be receiving
their ballots on October 19. Still, some members have fallen off (or been
dropped off) the union's LUIS information sharing application. Ballots must be received by November 29, 2021.
An independent monitor is in charge of this
process, and members should contact them or their local union if they don't get a ballot, although some
locals have been less than responsive.
All sides agree that a lack of
transparency and accountability has led to this disaster. But there is a third
factor that the sides do not agree on: the stranglehold on the UAW by the
Administration Caucus, which was founded in the late forties by UAW pioneer Walter
Reuther.
Walter and his brother Victor were
both members of the Socialist Party and part of a broad coalition of
progressives who built the UAW. It made sense that those organizers should make
sure that new leaders should share the social vision of its founders.
I chanced to run into the son of an
early UAW VP at a bar in Cape Cod, and he told me how it worked in the old days.
“My dad had to ask a union leader if he could run for steward. Dad was a smart
guy with a college degree, and he said OK, but most of his constituents were—let
us say—not Jewish, he explained, and would be unlikely to vote for a Jew. On
election day, the leader ran up to him, profusely apologizing that they had
misspelled his name on the ballot. Now it looked not-Jewish, and he won.” Such
shenanigans might seem understandable: Why should prejudice among new union
members trump solidarity?
And indeed, the UAW system won us
great pay, benefits, defined-benefit pensions, and a modicum of due process
dealing with management.
So, when I began working for
Chrysler in 1969, I was able to enjoy these benefits due to some hard
bargaining and costly strikes.
At the same time, the working
conditions were appalling. There were contaminants and crushing dangers everywhere.
Some folks roasted between paint ovens while sloshing toxic solvents over car
bodies and themselves. A man working in a pit near me was crushed to death by
an overhanging fixture moving down the line. Some foremen were just plan nasty
or incompetent buffoons—unnecessarily, because some were decent guys. Maybe two
women in a shop of 300. Few foremen were Black, and all were men. The
highest-ranking Black employee was a safety manager who sold safety shoes and
was there to take a fall when disaster struck. And it was pure, numbing
drudgery. We were treated like dumb children because it was dumbbell work.
Despite his social conscience,
Reuther's Administration Caucus was built to forestall rivals. And his unionism
tended toward what’s called business unionism. Focus on economics and let the
corporations manage. Reuther referred to auto factories as “gold-plated
sweatshops.”
Still, Reuther took progressive
social positions. He supported the Civil Rights movement. He opposed nuclear
energy. But he could not control what others would do with the Administration
Caucus after he was killed in a plane crash in 1970.
When Leonard Woodcock took over as
UAW president, he fired the anti-nuke staff and began hobnobbing with the
corporate elite. He became a diplomat after Doug Frazer took over the UAW
presidency.
Frazer confronted a great turning
point in the labor movement when the capitalists went on the
offensive. Frazer
had joined the Labor-Management Group, set up under the Nixon administration to
seek cooperative solutions to labor-management problems. But then Frazer saw
the light and quit in 1978, warning of “a one-
sided
class war." He declared, "I would rather sit with the rural poor, the
desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people
seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose
goal is profit and whose hearts are cold."
Our contracts had been improving
dramatically up to this period. We were up to 12 days paid personal leave each
year, in addition to our holidays, sick days, and supplemental unemployment
benefits during model change and other layoffs. But then came a series of
strategic attacks on the better union contracts. A fiscal crisis hit New York
City in 1978, and a special board dominated by financial bigwigs like Felix
Rohatyn “negotiated” concessions with city unions, all as part of a “rescue
plan.” The next year, Chrysler was facing bankruptcy, and another special board
concocted a rescue plan entailing dumping those personal days and exacting a
loan from union members in the form of delayed pay. Rohatyn
had advised on this rescue, as well. The “one-sided class war” that Dough
Frazer feared was being won by the one side fighting it. In 1979 union
membership was at its peak. It has plummeted ever since.
I wrote a poem about this disaster
called “The Crisis at Chrysler, 1979”:
An economic
system’s in disarray and fast decline,
And Chrysler
Corporation has the sickest bottom line
But that
doesn’t say
That Chrysler
can’t pay
When you
calculate the kickback:
While the
bankers, executives, lawyers and ad agents
Get interest and
rents, bribes, and dividend payments,
It’s crack
that whip
And here’s
your pink slip
For Joe and
Sally Sixpack.
Since that fateful year, UAW
membership has declined from 1.5 million to 400 thousand.
I entered union politics during the
70’s when an SDS comrade and I joined up with some African American brothers to
challenge the sitting local president. He was part of the Green Slate caucus
that dominated our local and was a pipeline to the Administration Caucus.
The Green slate had much to admire. They were very diverse,
they were mostly very capable, and their rough and tumble tactics can be
partially excused by the rough and tumble realities of working-class life and
confronting the boss. Management is always trying to take away everything
you’ve won, and you get hard representing your constituents, and you will kick
hard at anyone who tries to challenge you politically.
Still, there were few Blacks in
skilled trades, safety was pathetic, and we were a bunch of radicals who wanted
to bring back that socialist vision largely abandoned since Reuther.
I decided to run for shop steward
and won two votes.
By 1980 we had a new caucus, The
Progressive Movement. For several years we passed out flyers on safety, women's
rights, labor history, affirmative action in skilled trades, internationalism,
and socialism. In 1982, I won an upset election for Committeeperson.
At that time, the UAW might have
been autocratic but, by-and-large, it was not corrupt. "Spend it, don't
steal it," was what one international rep told me, regarding the perks of
office. What corruption I saw was a petty crook here or there: a former
committeeman who was a loan shark, another officer who was said to be a company
plant. Some skimming of interest from a union fund we were told was not
interest-bearing. Cheating on skilled trades exams. 300-dollar monthly stipends
for committeepersons—until I was elected, that is. And management played
favorites with their patsies, resolving a train of grievances for offering the
wrong guy overtime with money damages, while telling the rest of us, “we’ll
make it up next time.”
Oddly, the international union
broke up the caucuses in the locals around 1984, calling joint slates
“undemocratic.”
I am told that delegates to the
national convention are threatened and shouted down if they don’t support the
anointed AC candidates or are promised jobs with the International for going
along. I am not inclined to doubt it. The only time anyone outside the AC was
elected to the IEB was when Jerry Tucker was elected as Director Region 5 in
1986. This, however, was only after the National Labor Relations Board threw
out the first election because the AC had cheated.
But would AC officials sell us out
with a s**t sandwich for a bribe? I would have doubted it then, but now we
know.
The problem is we can’t leave it to
Administration Caucus to clean up their act. As reported in a 2019 Detroit News
article, two former UAW communications directors, Rev. Peter Laarman and Frank
Joyce, “broke what they called an ‘institutional code of silence’ to give a
scathing rebuke of the UAW leadership . . . [and] called for the resignations
of the UAW's entire international executive board. . . . All of them. Senior
staff assisting current officers and board members are themselves 'see no evil,
hear no evil,' enablers. They too should resign."
This is not to say every local or
regional official is culpable. I am forever grateful for my local president who
supported my leadership of a forty-organization coalition that worked to restore
voting rights to former felons in Delaware. However, even Laarman and Joyce
admit that, like frogs in a gradually warming pot of corruption, they were slow
to hop out.
In the debate held by the UAW Monitor
on October 7 of this year, Administrative Caucus arguments were weak. They
complained about all the old people speaking and claimed most UAW members don't
even know who the UAW President is, much less how the union should be run. Their
strongest arguments relied on the UAW’s tremendous record before the decline. See
for yourself at UAW
Monitorship Webinar.
By the way, the idea put forward by
Administration Caucus defenders that outside money (like Fiat Chryser’s!) could
influence a 1P1V election is dead on arrival. The Consent Agreement holds that
if 1P1V is chosen by the rank and file in the referendum, the manner in which
the 1P1V election will be carried out will be negotiated between the Monitor
and the present UAW IEB. Supporters of 1P1V like Unite
All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) have called on the monitor to impose
spending limits and reporting requirements. If the current IEB is worried about
outside money, they can support those limits and requirements, too.
The UAW is great because we had
great founding principles of solidarity, we had great leaders, and we had a rank
and file brave and bold enough to seize the plants until the Big Three accepted
the union. It will take an enormous effort to rebuild the UAW. Only the rank
and file can do it. We have an opportunity and a duty to recharge the labor
movement and to do that, we need to step up and select a new leadership
ourselves.
In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies,
multiplied a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever!
—Ralph Chapman, “Solidarity Forever,”
UAW Anthem
