UAW Vice President Comments on Pontiac Strike
21 July 1997
UAW Vice President Comments on Pontiac Strike
DETROIT, July 18 -- While welcoming the overwhelming 93.5
percent ratification vote by the membership of UAW Local 594, which ends the
strike at GM's Pontiac East assembly plant, UAW Vice President Richard
Shoemaker, who directs the union's General Motors Department, criticized the
corporation for taking so long to reach a settlement with the union.
"We are pleased that we have finally settled the strike at Pontiac East,"
Shoemaker said. He continued, "The overwhelming 93.5 percent ratification
vote by the membership shows that they are quite satisfied that the agreement
addresses the concerns that the members so courageously fought for.
"However," he emphasized, "the union is not at all pleased that the
company took so long to offer a basis for this settlement.
"The proposals submitted by the local union months ago were entirely
reasonable," Shoemaker said. "They reflected the concerns of the membership
for maintaining a safe workplace where people were not dangerously overloaded
on the assembly line, where quality standards could be maintained, where
health and safety problems were promptly attended to, where employees could
actually exercise their rights to earned vacation time and relief from heavy
overtime scheduling and a host of other issues that are equally important to
workers in the daily operation of a complex manufacturing facility.
"We are disappointed that the corporation has chosen to cast the
negotiations for local union agreements as a struggle to maintain
'competitiveness,' as if the only factor that determines competitiveness is
the number of workers on an assembly line," Shoemaker stated. "That is a
simplistic, self-serving and mistaken view of the many diverse factors that
impact the ability of a plant, and the company overall, to be 'competitive.'
"The whole idea being touted by a handful of analysts, and which
now appears to have become a mantra at GM, that GM's problem is simply
too many workers is plain wrong," Shoemaker said. "Furthermore, it
reflects an anti-worker mentality that again and again gets in the way of
making the changes that truly serve the needs of all of GM's stakeholders.
"We do not agree with the notion that GM's increased profitability should
be achieved at the expense of workers' health and safety, their working
conditions or their job security," Shoemaker stated. "Nor do we agree that
prolonging the settlement of local union issues serves the goal of making GM a
more competitive or profitable company.
"The cost of sustaining that mistaken view has been significant in just
the past few months alone," Shoemaker pointed out. "By the company's
admission, strikes in the second quarter of the year over local union issues
have cost 96,000 units of production with an after tax effect of an estimated
$490 million, nearly half a billion dollars," he added.
"The cost to the workers and their families, in lost wages and standard of
living, has also been immense. As well, GM customers have had to wait longer
for certain models and as a consequence, GM has lost customers during this
lengthy strike," the UAW leader continued.
"Also lost, or at best seriously eroded, is the respect and trust in the
company by its UAW-represented workers across the country," Shoemaker stated.
"It is a fact," he added, "that one of the key elements of competitiveness in
successful companies is a belief by workers that their employer is genuinely
interested in their concerns and their future. When workers believe that the
company is interested in their needs, workers are more fully committed to the
company's overall goals.
"In prolonging the settlement of these recent strikes, GM has squandered
years of efforts to address this important element of competitiveness,"
Shoemaker said. "It will take a long time for the company to regain the trust
and respect of its UAW-represented workforce.
"People are GM's most valuable resource and to become truly competitive
the company needs to give far greater consideration to issues of importance to
the workers who built the cars and components that wear the GM badge,"
Shoemaker said.
"UAW-represented GM workers are a vital part of the solution, not the
problem, and the company would serve its stakeholders far better by taking
steps to avoid costly confrontations," Shoemaker concluded.
SOURCE UAW
