http://themilitant.com/2015/7937/793704.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 79/No. 37 October 19, 2015
(front page)
Fiat Chrysler workers vote down
contract to protest two-tier wages
Toledo Blade/Shelby Kardell
Deep hostility to two-tier wages and benefits took auto bosses and union
officials by surprise. Above, workers campaign against contract outside
union meeting in Toledo, Ohio,
Sept. 27.
BY ILONA GERSH
CHICAGO — In a vote that surprised both the auto bosses and top
officials of the United Auto Workers, 36,000 union members at Fiat
Chrysler rejected a proposed contract by a two-to-one margin. This is
the first time a national contract negotiated between the UAW officials
and a major carmaker has been voted down in more than 30 years.
Company bosses and UAW officials thought that a $3,000 signing bonus and
some pay raises would sell the contract. But they were out of touch with
the level of deep hostility to the two-tier deal, especially among
younger workers.
“The vote represented our rejection of the tier system of wages,” said
Alan Epstein, who has worked at the Toledo Jeep plant since the 1980s,
in a phone interview Oct. 3. Production workers there voted 87 percent
against the deal. “In 2007 the auto companies cried poverty and the UAW
let them set up a two-tier wage system. They’ve hired thousands of
workers since then. The Big Three are making big profits now. But the
proposed contract sets up many more tiers.”
Presently, new hires start at just over half the pay of workers hired
before 2007. The 40-page summary of the defeated contract groups workers
hired since then in wage tiers based on how many years they have been
employed. They would top out at between $22 to $25.35 an hour, but never
reach the $29.76 promised to “legacy” production workers by the end of
the contract.
Workers were told in 2007 and 2011 that the second tier would be capped
at 25 percent of the workforce, but that was never written into the
contract.
“Forty-three percent of the workers at Fiat Chrysler are in the second
tier,” said Epstein. “They just don’t buy the proposal. Some of them got
together and printed T-shirts with the union logo and a cobra that said
‘Ready to strike.’”
Chrysler, the smallest of the “Big Three” Detroit automakers, was hit
hardest by the opening of the capitalist economic crisis in 2008,
spiraling into bankruptcy. As part of a government-brokered bailout, the
union retiree health trust fund bought 55 percent of the company. The
U.S. and Canadian governments bought 10 percent. Fiat got the rest,
though it paid no money. Fiat bought out the others, taking complete
ownership earlier this year.
Chrysler has increased sales for 44 straight months.
The UAW uses pattern bargaining to negotiate contracts with the Big
Three auto companies. Once the first contract is achieved, the idea is
that the other two will follow suit.
UAW President Dennis Williams issued a statement Oct. 1 saying the union
would notify Fiat Chrysler “that further discussions are needed.”
The vote followed a September UAW organizing victory at the Commercial
Vehicle Group in Piedmont, Alabama. The 210 workers there make truck
seats. Alan Amos, a welder and 10-year veteran of CVG who helped
spearhead the organizing effort, told the New York Times that the
breaking point came this spring. “There were conversations around the
break room about how things kept getting worse and worse,” Amos said,
citing high temperatures inside the plant, worsening benefits and the
extensive use of temporary workers who earn $9.70 an hour and have no
insurance.
The growing militancy by workers at fast-food outlets, Walmart and
others at the low end of the wage scale has boosted the fighting spirit
of workers in the auto industry.
“The Fight for $15 shows that some of the lowest-paid workers have
decided to put up a fight,” Aradia Clark, a member of UAW Local 551 in
the paint shop at Ford’s plant here, told the Militant, adding that she
is hopeful about the auto contract fights.
“Opposition to the contract here is across the board,” she said. “The
legacy workers have been waiting for a decade to get back what we gave
up. And the workers in the second tier, who voted for the contract in
2011 because they thought they would be promoted out of it, don’t have
confidence that will happen anymore.
“The profits of the auto companies are being made because of our cheap
labor,” Clark said. “If a contract like that is ratified, eventually
we’ll have nothing but second, third and fourth tier workers because all
the older workers will have retired.”
Labor now accounts for $1,771 of the cost of each vehicle Fiat Chrysler
makes in the U.S., according to Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the
Center for Automotive Research. That’s down from $4,167 per vehicle in
2007.
In July, Ford posted its largest-ever North American quarterly profit
and its best automotive profit since 2000, as net income rose 44 percent
in the second quarter.
“The company and the union officers were surprised by the Chrysler
vote,” Clark said. “They bank on the ignorance of the young workers and
expected them to walk mindlessly into the vote.”
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Fast-food workers lead fight for $15 in Chicago suburbs
Fight frame-up of Quebec rail workers!
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