UAW Says GM Jobs Are Coming Back
by Jeff Gilbert
WWJ AutoBeat Reporter
As the UAW lays out plans to use this year's contract talks to add more jobs, a top union official said today that all laid off GM manufacturing workers will be back to work within a few months.
"We only have about two thousand people now laid off, and those people will all be back to work in September," said UAW Vice President Joe Ashton, who heads the union's GM negotiating team. "We'll have full employment in General Motors, this September, for the first time in quite a long time."
That also includes new employees, hired at a lower rate to staff the Orion plant, that reopens later this year. Ashton defended that as necessary to bring work to the U.S. One of the products to be made at Orion is the Chevy Sonic, the replacement for the current made-in-South Korea Chevy Aveo.
GM will also make a compact Buick, the Verano, at Orion. Both are products that GM says couldn't be made profitably in the U.S. under normal conditions.
Ashton said a goal of the upcoming talks will be to get other new products into plants that are currently in limbo.
"We still have plants we don't have work in," he said. "Those plants are Spring Hill (Tennessee,) Shreveport, Louisiana and Janesville (Wisconsin.) One of the most important things were going to go into these negotiations is to get work in those facilities."
The talks also will focus on bringing back work now done by suppliers. Ashton said the ripple effect from the earthquake problems in Japan shows how this could actually be a help to the domestic car companies.
"We shouldn't have to worry that our plants are shutdown because we can't get parts from Japan," he said. "Those plants should be made in our facilities, by our workers on a day by day basis."
That's not an issue unique to General Motors. General Holyfield, who heads the Chrysler bargaining team, says 75 per cent of suppliers that the company deals with are non union.
"Those people that are doing those jobs, that we call independent suppliers, that are not registered under the banner of this UAW, I'm coming after my jobs, that I used to do yesterday."
Holyfield, however, saying that thee rapid recovery of Chrysler was a miracle that he thanks God for every day.
The union will also push forward with its plans to organize "transplants," non-union, foreign owned companies that have factories in the U.S. They will announce a target soon, and try to get the company to agree to "principals for fair union" elections that the UAW has worked out.
Richard Bensinger, who heads the union's organizing efforts says they drew up those guidelines with assistance from corporate executives, who said the guidelines were fair, but also said they wouldn't agree to the guidelines unless pressured.
"When would you agree, their comment is 'only if a union ran a campaign against us that forced us to agree, would we agree.' Well, we got it"
The UAW has enlisted a global team of young people aimed at putting pressure on companies that refuse to agree to what the union feels are fair elections.
Follow Jeff Gilbert on Twitter @jefferygilbert
