The national strike against the United States’ largest automaker stretched into its 20th day Saturday, a day after two former United Auto Workers communications directors called for the resignations of the union’s entire international executive board amid a widening federal corruption probe.
Negotiators for the UAW and General Motors Co. returned to the bargaining table at 9 a.m. Saturday. The previous evening, talks had recessed at the relatively early hour of 7 p.m., as 46,000 hourly striking employees, including more than 17,000 in Michigan, missed their regular paychecks for a second straight week.
The Rev. Peter Laarman, who ran the union’s public relations department from 1985 to 1990, and Frank Joyce, who ran it from 1990 to 2002, broke what they called an “institutional code of silence” to deliver a scathing rebuke of the UAW leadership for abandoning the practices of the formerly “squeaky-clean organization built by the union’s earlier generations.”
“Based on the number of indictments, guilty pleas and raids so far, it’s obviously not just one or two rotten apples,” they wrote in an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press. “It’s a whole bushel.”
The two suggested an interim team operate the union and develop a process of transparency to “democratically reconstitute” the union’s leadership. The Canadian auto workers union Unifor could assist in the process, they suggested.
The federal investigation into union corruption has led to nine convictions, charges against two more people, and has implicated UAW President Gary Jones and his predecessor, Dennis Williams.
Neither Jones nor Williams have been charged, but The Detroit News last month identified them as unnamed officials accused of orchestrating a years-long conspiracy that involved embezzling $1 million in member dues and spending the money on personal luxuries
A UAW spokesman declined to comment to Saturday morning about the broadside against the union.
UAW Vice President Terry Dittes signaled in a letter Friday that bargainers had made progress at the main negotiating table on health care and a path forward for temporary workers. But GM and UAW still had not reached tentative agreements on some of the most substantive aspects of the new contract, Dittes said. Still outstanding were proposals on wages, job security, skilled trades and pensions. Under CEO Mary Barra, GM has pushed to control fixed costs and is a much more disciplined company than the one that emerged from bankruptcy under a federal bailout a decade ago.
Even if a tentative agreement is reached, UAW leadership might might decide not end the walkout until rank-and-file members ratify a contract, which would keep plants closed for several more days.
Meantime, negotiators at Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NVre ported late in the week that they had reached tentative agreements on nearly all subcommittees.
Ford, Fiat Chrysler and the UAW agreed separately to extend the 2015 contract while GM and the union negotiate. Whatever GM-UAW membership ratifies would lay the framework for the deals presented to membership at Ford and Fiat Chrysler
Economists and experts have said a strike lasting nearly a month could throw Michigan into a recession, as the ripple effect from the strike would take time to dissipate. Some auto suppliers have had to turn to temporary lay-offs because there are no GM plants to supply.
GM has had to idle or reduce work at five assembly, engine and propulsion plants in Mexico, Ohio and Ontario because of the strike. Those work stoppages have affected nearly 10,000 non-UAW employees.
Strike pay for GM employees is $250 per week. For comparison, top-paid production employees earn $30.46 per hour, or about $1,218 per week.
ithibodeau@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @Ian_Thibodeau
Staff writer Breana Noble contributed
Read or Share this story: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2019/10/05/gm-strike-day-20/3879242002/