Magazine Story

What Went Wrong in the American Axle Strike?

— Wendy Thompson and Chris Kutalik

The aftershocks of the late-May defeat of the American Axle and Manufacturing (AAM) strike will be felt in the unionized sections of the auto industry—and beyond—for years to come. Swinging in line with the deep concessions made in the Big 3 contract settlements last fall, the AAM deal effectively completes the gutting of union contracts in the auto parts industry.

Close to two-thirds of all auto workers were union in the early 1980s; by 2006 that number had shrunk to just under 30 percent. Once a United Auto Workers stronghold, the parts sector in the past two decades has been the vanguard of the union’s decline.

The steep givebacks at AAM will cut current workers’ wages in half and eliminate pensions for new hires (see Labor Notes May 2008). Workers estimate that a third will soon retire or take a buyout rather than work for these wages.

And AAM managers have added to the bitterness with a tough crackdown on work rules. “Managers were told to break us,” said Sylvia Moore, a skilled-trades worker at Detroit Axle, to a crowd of 250 supporters at a June 14 tribute dinner for the strikers. “We’re not even allowed to talk to each other on the line anymore. You talk, you get written up.”

BEYOND MOURNING

Faced with setbacks of such magnitude, old union warhorses might echo Joe Hill’s ghost: “Don’t mourn, organize!” But winning such fights is possible only if unions take stock, learn the lessons, and change course.

The UAW has a strike fund of $1 billion, and AAM was profitable. The strike shut down 35 General Motors plants that rely on AAM parts in some way. The union had huge economic leverage and yet it lost the strike. What could it have done to win?

Even if the union had done everything right, this strike was no slam dunk. Wages were already low at AAM’s union and non-union competitors. CEO Dick Dauch was known for his hard-headedness, and he had acquired plants in Mexico and lower-wage ones in the U.S. outside the UAW’s master agreement.

But the UAW did not use the considerable advantages it had. One seed of victory was a local membership open to action. As the strike wore on, some members in Detroit spoke up for blocking truck deliveries, holding community rallies, or civil disobedience at the plant gates.

In a state with one of the highest union densities in the country, the union could have tapped thousands to come out for rallies or to swell picket lines. The UAW alone has well over 100,000 members in the immediate area.

But instead of keeping the pressure on AAM through such actions, union tops wavered. The UAW International had called for a large community rally in mid-April in downtown Detroit. But after Dauch requested that they call it off, officials dutifully agreed to indefinitely “postpone” the action.

Many rank and filers saw the cancellation as a betrayal, and the olive branch to Dauch had no effect, as negotiations dragged on for weeks longer.

“I was so angry that the International had cancelled the rally,” said Ada Walker of Local 235. Walker was arrested at a 1,500-member-strong rally that Local 235 organized on its own, in Detroit. The rally shut down Holbrook Avenue, which runs through Detroit Axle and past corporate headquarters, for several hours.

CONTRACT CAMPAIGN

Besides tactics during the strike, UAW leaders could have put the heat on before the contract expired—relying on members like Walker.

Contract campaigns are not a radical notion; the UAW could have cribbed from the mobilization manuals of CWA, UNITE HERE, or SEIU. The best of these campaigns rely on a full-court press. Member-to-member networks, contract action teams, informational pickets, rallies inside the workplace, shop floor actions, media blitzes, working-to-rule, floods of grievances, and other creative tactics fit together in a long-term fight that involves members early on.

Strong contract campaigns sometimes begin as early as a year and a half before expiration, and escalate over a time frame that keeps pace with tactics at the bargaining table. A key factor is keeping members informed and participating with a transparent negotiating strategy.

In 2006, more than a year before expiration, Dauch had demanded concessions, and when the UAW refused to open the contract, he threatened to put no new work into the five union plants under the master contract. That early warning should have been the starting point of a contract campaign.

Key tactics could have been working-to-rule and an overtime ban. This would have reduced the stockpile of parts that AAM used as a buffer during the first weeks of the strike.

And the union should not have ignored the two AAM plants that were not under the master agreement. Although their contracts were not up, members there could have been brought into the fight as well.

TAKING STOCK

At the negotiating table early this year, American Axle executives looked for and ultimately received the host of concessions that other major unionized parts makers have enjoyed at the expense of workers.

The fact that many of those parts makers were able to use bankruptcy courts to force open contracts mid-term to win these goals—and that American Axle has itself been profitable—made little difference. The balance of power swung toward the company and away from a union led by officials afraid to use their influence.

The new contract pushes American Axle workers even further outside the protective skirt of the UAW’s master contracts with the Big 3. Though formally under a separate national contract after GM sold its axle and gear plants in 1994, the union kept many of the strong provisions in the GM contract intact at the company.

The recent agreement wipes out these contractual defenses. In a major give-away, the new agreement surrenders the right to strike at the end of the grievance procedure for health and safety issues in favor of arbitration. By ignoring the old, stronger body of GM arbitration case law, the strength of all new arbitrations themselves will be greatly weakened.

Instead of saving jobs through painful but supposedly necessary concessions, UAW officials may have only emboldened the company more. AAM further weakened the remaining leverage the UAW could have wielded with its national agreement by effectively decreasing the share of production overall under the terms of that agreement.

While two master agreement plants will close, two other plants under separate UAW contracts with lower wages and benefits will remain open. Non-union plants bought up by the company in recent years are also expected to stay up and working.

Even more ominously, this double-breasting is expected to go global. Less than a week after the strike settled, AAM executives announced that they expect 85 percent of their new production will now come from Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Poland, and Thailand. An estimated 65 percent to 70 percent of those new parts are expected to come back to U.S. plants to be assembled.

NO PARTIAL MEASURES

The UAW could have used some of the strike tactics it got partially right to fuller advantage.

For one, it could have put more pressure on GM, AAM’s main customer, in order to convince GM to twist Dauch’s arm to settle. The UAW called a May walkout at the Chevy Malibu plant in Kansas, which prodded GM to offer money for buyouts. But that strike was short and late in the game.

To its credit, the UAW investigated and tracked the movement of scab parts coming from Mexico. Unfortunately, it did very little with the information. Pickets could have been set up at delivery points, and workers could have refused to move the parts at UAW plants.

The UAW could have promoted an aggressive strategy to counter AAM’s threats to bring in scabs in the last weeks of the strike. A number of Detroit members cited fear of scabs as a reason they voted for the contract.

UAW International officials told workers at the Detroit contract information meeting that the laws were stacked against the union when it came to scab threats. But in fact, federal law makes it difficult to permanently replace workers in an unfair labor practices strike, like this one.

More important, unions have time-tested methods for keeping scabs off the property: exposing and mass picketing scab-provider firms, pressuring individual scabs, and physically preventing them from crossing the lines.

Over the long run, of course, the union must organize the growing majority of non-union parts workers. More defeats will follow if UAW leaders refuse to commit member organizers and money at the scale needed.

The AAM strike faced shorter odds than many. The power to put up a credible fight was there; the difficult part was building a vibrant rank-and-file movement that organized around how to use it.

[Wendy Thompson is the retired president of UAW Local 235 at Detroit Axle.]

Farmworkers Beat Burger King, But Face Resistance From Growers

— Tiffany Ten Eyck

In the David and Goliath match-up between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the fast food industry, the little guy has tripped up the giant again. Bowing to an intense corporate campaign, Burger King signed an agreement in late May that conceded all of the farmworker organization’s demands. But a backlash from the growers that supply Burger King has at least temporarily halted the deal’s implementation.

It’s the third time in three years the CIW could claim victory against a behemoth corporation. After a four-year boycott of Taco Bell and pressure on its parent company, Yum! Brands, the CIW convinced the company in 2005 to meet all of its demands: a penny more per pound paid to Immokalee workers who pick tomatoes bought by the company, an enforceable code of conduct for growers and the industry, and an assurance that the CIW would have the ability to monitor and audit the penny pass-down.

According to the CIW, the extra penny would spike the rate paid for each 32-pound bucket picked, from an average of 45 cents to 77 cents. At the current rate, workers have to pick two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes each day to earn minimum wage.

Last April, just a year into their campaign against McDonald’s, CIW announced that it had also yielded to the farmworkers’ demands. Soon after, the rest of Yum!’s brands—A&W, Long John Silvers, KFC, and Pizza Hut—followed suit.

Burger King took just more than a year to crack. One of the toughest opponents the farmworkers have faced, BK fell after a tumultuous campaign that included a surveillance scandal and continued pressure from consumers. Burger King agreed to the same conditions as McDonald’s and Taco Bell, and more. The agreement includes an extra half-cent going directly to growers to cover the payroll and administrative costs that enacting the agreement would entail.

RESISTANCE FROM GROWERS

Even with the good news, CIW activists say there’s still much work to be done. Recent moves by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), which represents most Florida growers, have made it harder to transfer the corporations’ commitments—and pennies—down to the fields in Florida.

In the early years of the CIW’s history, farmworkers would target growers in the fields of south and central Florida, where wages were essentially unchanged since 1978. Growers said they simply could not afford to do anything about farmworker wages or conditions—they were being squeezed by purchasing conglomerates run by corporate buyers. The organization’s strategy of targeting the top of the supply chain, the mega-purchasers themselves, was born of these experiences.

Now, even with an ever-larger group of corporate buyers exerting pressure, the growers are still dragging their feet. After the April 2007 agreement with McDonald’s—which was to be put in place at the start of the growing season that fall—the growers took measures to prevent the money from reaching farmworkers’ pockets.

The FTGE told its members that if they passed down the corporations’ pennies, it would charge them a $100,000 fine per worker, per paycheck. FTGE Vice President Reggie Brown called the CIW’s agreements “illegal and un-American.”

Growers conceded, and the FTGE succeeded in stopping the penny pass-through that had been in place since the CIW won the Taco Bell boycott in 2005.

According to CIW staffer Julia Perkins, all three corporate entities have agreed to funnel the pennies into an escrow account until growers get back on board, an outcome the CIW says companies have committed to helping bring about.

“As the news of the agreement [with Burger King] came out, Brown said that the FTGE was not going to be implementing the fine,” said Perkins.

Brown’s reason for the change of heart? The media had been paying too much attention to his extreme fines, in the light of the CIW’s campaigns.

“We need to reach a tipping point,” said Perkins. “The more buyers that we have that are telling their growers: ‘lock in this agreement and work with us to improve the conditions for workers in your supply chain and you’ll have our business’…the more growers will want to participate.”

A SCANDAL ROYALE

The CIW is used to pushback from their corporate targets, but when they began investigating mysterious phone calls and erroneous and threatening postings online, they were surprised when all leads pointed directly to Burger King headquarters (see Labor Notes May 2008).

Burger King was implicated in the hiring of a surveillance firm which posed as students to infiltrate an ally, the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA). Then, the CIW began to trace the origin of threatening posts that appeared whenever an article or video about the coalition was posted online.

Organizers and journalists eventually found the source—Burger King Vice President Steve Grover, the executive targeted by the CIW. The company fired both Grover and media spokesperson Keva Silversmith, who was implicated in leaking an internal memo to the growers’ association.

Under mounting pressure from the media and CIW supporters as a result of the scandal, Burger King gave in to the CIW’s demands just weeks later.

“It was a question of using all of Burger King’s missteps and outrageous behavior against them,” said Marc Rodrigues, an SFA organizer.

WINNING PLAYBOOK

The now-frequent question faced by CIW and its allies is, “How do you do it?”

“Having a strong network of allies that are committed and diverse and go at your target at different angles has helped the CIW win,” explained Rodrigues. “We’ve had students protesting at restaurants, faith communities organizing churches to send letters to the company, and we’ve been targeting private equity owners.”

Rodrigues and Perkins agree that the research they do to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their targets has been important. When organizers realized that Burger King is partially owned by private equity firms like Goldman Sachs and Texas Pacific Group—which has a history of making deals with pressure groups to stem bad press—organizers began linking their targets.

CIW corresponded with board members from the owning firms, and in 2007 started a march at the Miami offices of Goldman Sachs that ended at Burger King.

CIW organizers also say that their high-profile media presence has been crucial. It was a key element in bringing support from several U.S. senators in this campaign.

Organizers say they don’t need a big PR firm to make a splash. “We’ve succeeded in focusing on the strong point this campaign has: the daily work of a farmworker and what that entails,” Rodrigues said.

What has also helped the CIW succeed is a long-term vision for industry-wide changes in agriculture. As early as 2005, CIW reached out to all the major buyers of Florida tomatoes, a rogues gallery of corporate titans that includes Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Subway, and Chipotle, informing them of the poor wages and working conditions of tomato pickers in their supply chains.

“We’re spending the summer figuring out what the next steps of the campaign are going to be,” Perkins said. “All the retail buyers of Florida tomatoes have been made aware of the situation. No one can feign ignorance.”

SEIU Reformers Challenge Union’s Direction at Puerto Rico Convention

— Mark Brenner

Carrying a message of union democracy, reformers left their mark on the 2008 Service Employees (SEIU) convention, which took place May 30 to June 4 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Opposition to SEIU top leaders’ plans to dramatically restructure the union coalesced around the newly formed caucus SEIU Members for Reform Today (SMART) and the large bloc of delegates from United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), the 140,000-member California local at odds with the International since February.

Bucking the convention’s tight script and pep-rally atmosphere, reformers challenged key elements of but were unable to prevent their passage.

WHO’S AT THE TABLE?

One flash point was the coordination of national negotiations. Reformers attempted to amend the International’s proposal for dealing with designated “strategic employers” to ensure that elected rank-and-file members were a part of any national bargaining team.

Speaking to the assembled delegates, Maya Morris, a SMART leader and UHW executive board member, outlined several shortcomings of the Stern plan. “These proposals do not guarantee democratic decision-making,” she said. “They do not guarantee the right of rank-and-file members to participate at every level of contract negotiations. In fact, rank-and-file members are excluded at the highest level of contract negotiations and replaced with boards of appointed leaders and staff, mostly from Washington, D.C., rather than from local unions.”

Tony Aidukas, a sports rehab specialist at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs and UHW member, told delegates that his experience on the bargaining committee at Tenet Health Systems last year left much to be desired.

“We were placed in another room while national negotiators did the face-to-face negotiations with our employer,” Aidukas said. “They agreed to subcontract 12 percent of our work and we had to spend seven months at the table to reverse that tentative agreement. If members had been in the room that would never have occurred.”

Ultimately, delegates voted overwhelmingly to approve the package of Stern-backed changes addressing national bargaining and internal structure.

Paulette Forbes, a radiologic technologist at Brookdale Hospital and member of 1199 New York, captured the sentiment of many delegates. “I’m not going according to the paper that’s being distributed here, but based on the fact that I’ve been a rank-and-file member for the past 19 years,” she said. “I’ve seen real democracy taking place in this union. Our leadership cannot lead without us having a say. And that’s why we have given our leaders power of attorney to make certain decisions for us, because we have to work.”

For the next three days voting followed a similar pattern. Whenever a contested proposal emerged, whether the International’s plan to shift grievance handling to off-site call centers or rank-and-file appeals for stronger support of single-payer health care reform, large majorities of the delegates lined up behind the leadership.

DISMEMBERING UHW

The dispute between UHW and the International came to a head at the convention, centering on the fate of the 65,000 long-term home care workers currently part of UHW.

Just weeks before the convention, the International initiated a review of UHW’s long-term care jurisdiction. Following a heated debate, convention delegates approved a plan to create a single long-term care local in each state. This move will likely settle the outcome of the jurisdictional hearings and transfer the workers out of UHW.

“They think this is over,” said Ella Raiford, a 35-year member of UHW, reflecting on the convention vote. “But this is just the end of round one. If they put us in a different local and think we’re just going to go home and be quiet, they have another thing coming.”

On the last day of the convention, SMART delegates posed a final challenge to the Stern team, fielding a dozen individual candidates for seats on the executive board. Running individually, rather than as a slate, reformers forced a paper-ballot vote, allowing delegates to split their votes.

The tactic sent convention organizers scrambling, and pushed the convention’s final session well into the evening, denying officials the rousing finale they had planned.

SMART activists now face the daunting challenge of building a solid rank-and-file organization. “This is really just the beginning,” said Arturo Diaz, a member of Local 721 and a computer programmer for Los Angeles County. “What we really have to do now is organize, organize, organize. There are no short cuts. We have to do this one at a time, member to member, trying to convince people to move to action.”

UHW leaders have not given up their struggle to maintain a single union for health care workers in California. On June 14, the local held several “mega-meetings” to oppose state budget cuts proposed for home care services and promote its message of industrial unity. More than 7,000 members and supporters attended events in Sacramento, Fresno, and San Francisco.

After Years of Struggle, California Hotel Workers Make Gains

— Mischa Gaus

The first contract signed June 4 at the Hilton Hotel in Glendale, California is nothing to sneeze at these days—modest raises, health care costs cut in half, and relief from a crushing workload.

But its significance for hotel workers struggling to lift standards nationwide is even greater. In September 2005, the Los Angeles-area Hilton was where UNITE HERE launched its Hotel Workers Rising campaign.

In an era when many unions rely on one-shot strategies, the national drive was remarkable for using aggressive contract campaigns at existing union strongholds to build momentum and to demand neutrality rights for drives at unorganized hotels. The campaign drew on a wide range of tactics, from lining up contract expirations to striking to sitting in at hotel doors.

The Glendale deal means far more than organizing numbers or dollars and cents to Angela Reid, a bartender who became a spokeswoman for Hotel Workers Rising as she toured the country speaking at rallies.

“I kept saying to myself, it’s going to happen any day now,” she said. “Any day now turned into three-and-a-half years.”

By that time Reid and her co-workers had beaten the hotel decisively, wearing down management through an intensely organized inside campaign and boycott that drove out one owner and brought in a second eager to call a truce.

A WINNING HABIT

Workers at the Glendale Hilton didn’t wait to win their union before acting like one. For more than a year, a 30-member core committee met weekly in secret, preparing for the public launch of the campaign.

That came with a delegation of 70, including local politicians and clergy, who confronted the general manager and demanded card-check neutrality. (Card check brings in a union when a majority of workers sign cards saying they want one).

“From that day on the whole hotel changed,” Reid said. “It wasn’t even the same hotel anymore.”

Security cameras went up, and long lines formed at the employee entrance as a private security agency set up a metal detector and searched bags.

The heavy-handed tactics backfired. When cooks showed up at the barricade, the security guards panicked. No one had told them that kitchen staff had to purchase their own knives and carry them into work every day.

Little indignities piled up, and management lost control as workers organized into dozens of micro-committees by job task or site. They took over captive-audience meetings, and formed delegations of 30 or 40 that besieged the general manager constantly, demanding that a decision be overturned or an aggressive junior manager be reined in.

They beat back an attempt to add more glasses in hotel rooms, and won a drop in housekeepers’ daily room-cleaning load, from 16 to 15. Management tried playing nice to de-rail the campaign, sweetening paychecks by 50 cents an hour and offering a promotion to a cook, a key leader in the kitchen. He didn’t bite.

“The leaders were in the forefront, training workers to be organizers,” said Bethany Holmes, lead organizer at the hotel. “It got to the point where we didn’t have a lot of staff on it because the leaders were pushing each other.”

LONG, STEADY FIGHT

But the local fight wasn’t enough to win. Although UNITE HERE had signed a national neutrality agreement with the Hilton corporation in 2006, it only applied to sites Hilton actually owned and operated. The Glendale Hilton was owned by Eagle Hospitality, which controlled 12 other hotels across the country.

UNITE HERE launched a boycott of Eagle properties and pickets went up in front of the Glendale hotel each week, attracting 30 to 100 workers. Soon, Glendale was exporting its picketers to five hotels around the Los Angeles airport where organizing drives had surfaced. Four of those would settle in 18 months, except for the airport Hilton, where the owner lives in the hotel and continues to stage a nasty fight.

The situation in Glendale ground along for years, with management betting that workers would tire of the tense environment. Meanwhile the boycott gradually chipped away the hotel’s lucrative conference business.

Organizers credit the union’s deep-relationship model of organizing, which slowly builds intensely personal connections, for allowing the campaign to persevere.

Those tight bonds kept people from falling away at Glendale, giving the boycott time to starve Eagle of what the union estimates was $1 million. Eagle was swallowed in a merger last fall and the new management came with an offer: card-check neutrality in exchange for an end to the fight.

Within four days about 85 percent of the Hilton’s workers had signed cards and ushered in a new day.

“There’s no tipping point, just the cumulative effect of putting pressure,” said Mark Westerberg, a Glendale bellman for four years who joined UNITE HERE as an organizer after the campaign. “We made it obvious that they were going to have a union whether they liked it or not.”

Raiding: Fighting Over Scraps Leaves Labor Hungry

— David Cohen

The question of raiding — one union convincing members of another union to decertify and join the competitor — has been a hot-button issue once more this year in the labor movement.

In one of the largest flash points, the California Nurses Association and the Service Employees have been trading blows over an escalating series of raids conducted by both sides.

Much of this recent raiding is done in the name of building “union density,” which is narrowly described as all the union members in a profession or industry belonging to the same union, and perhaps the same union local.

My views on raiding are shaped by the experience of my own union, the United Electrical Workers (UE). When the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1948, corporations, the government, and their union allies conspired to destroy progressive, militant, and democratic unions, including UE.

Taft-Hartley required union officers to sign anti-communist loyalty oaths, and those who refused could not appear on ballots in NLRB-run elections.

Unions like the UAW or the newly created International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) would demand recognition from an employer whose workers were members of UE. The employer would file a petition with the NLRB asking for an election.

The courts then would deny the UE the right to appear on the ballot and the other union would win.

In a handful of years, several hundred thousand members were raided out of UE, at one time the third largest union in the CIO. Twelve other unions were simply raided out of existence.

The only union of the progressive stripe to survive was the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The destruction of the progressive unions has had repercussions to this day.

HOW ABOUT ORGANIZING?

Union raiding adds no new members to the labor movement.

There are about 100 million unorganized workers in the United States today—plenty to go around for unions that want to organize. The problem is that it’s harder to organize new workers, for all the reasons we know. It’s much easier to raid existing unions.

In Connecticut, UE represents a group of workers in the public sector. They formerly were members of an independent union that was made up of bargaining units that had left various other unions. In some cases, the independent union raided other public sector unions—and was raided in turn.

Raiding was an accepted way of life in the Connecticut public sector in the last two decades. Although many unions didn’t like it, they justified their raiding on account of other unions’ raiding. It was a vicious cycle.

At the end of a contract, during the “open period” (when unions can switch affiliation), many locals would hold open houses, inviting various unions to come speak to members. These sessions invariably turned into bazaars where the different unions made promises about how they could get workers better wages and benefits.

Workers would shop around for the union that would charge them the least and promise them the most. The very idea that workers needed to struggle and fight to better themselves, and that the members are the union, was lost in the orgy of shopping and raiding.

Once the independent union affiliated with UE, we worked to convince members that raiding was not beneficial to anybody. A no-raiding agreement now exists among most of the unions in Connecticut’s public sector.

EXCEPTIONS MAY APPLY

There are a few exceptions. Gangster “unions”—those that prey on workers, especially immigrant workers—still exist. These sham unions tend to be in low-paid factories. Usually the workers never get to see the contract, and have high dues and initiation fees. They are not affiliated with any labor bodies.

Oftentimes if workers start a fuss, the “union rep” will show up and perhaps the workers will get a nickel raise. But these are not real unions and should be forced out of existence.

There are also still company unions in various forms at individual workplaces, some more openly controlled by management than others.

I once worked at an auto parts plant that had a company-controlled union, and I led the drive to join UE. To try to stop the new union, management told company union leaders to ask for a pay raise. They did, and then the workers received a raise. Fortunately, it didn’t stop the drive.

STAY AND FIGHT

Often, over the years, when workers from other unions have come to UE and asked if they could join, we have told them to stay and fight inside their own unions to take control.

Teaching workers how to run a functioning democratic union is of more use to them in their struggles. The workers often took over their locals and transformed them into decent, member-run organizations.

Today, there are troubling new trends that make it harder to give that answer. The emergence of huge mega-locals makes it extremely difficult for members to take control of their unions from anti-democratic or pro-employer forces.

The ease and frequency with which some unions trustee locals in order to remove leaders they don’t agree with is also troubling. In some cases, workers may have no other recourse than to leave and join another union.

But the main thrust of the labor movement still needs to be on the tough job of organizing new workers.

Anywhere there are unorganized workers we should be there, finding the new leaders who will carry forward the next upsurge of organizing.