Auto strike idles GM plants

By Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the June 13, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

Members of United Auto Workers Local 659 employed at the General Motors Flint Metal Center were walking picket lines this week in a bitter struggle to force GM to live up to its promise of upgrading the aging facility.

Bill Kyle, a quality technician at the plant for almost 24 years, said it was a strike whose time had come. "We can't give them any more, he said. Every time you turn around they're taking jobs out of here.

Two decades of cost cutting and closings have resulted in the loss of about 50,000 jobs in Flint. Workers at the stamping plant fear their jobs may be next. And with good reason.

Flint's Buick City plant is slated to close next year, wiping out 2,800 jobs, while a new engine plant will employ only about 1,400 workers compared to 3,500 at the current engine plant.

This situation in Flint is a dramatic example of GM's 'America Last' strategy," Shoemaker said, "in which the corporation is attempting to radically downsize its American work force in favor of exploiting less than poverty level wages in other countries.

What makes this situation more troubling, he said, is that in the same way GM is ignoring our national and local contracts, it is also ignoring its responsibility to American workers by transferring jobs, technology and capital out of the United States.

The rising tide of success once floated the rowboats and skiffs of the workers as well as the yachts of the top executives, Shoemaker said, but it is obviously no longer true that the success of the corporation is being shared at all levels.

Norman McComb, vice president of Local 659, made little effort to conceal his anger when asked about the strike of the 3,400 members of UAW Local 659 at the Flint Metal Center.

We are a stamping plant and make hoods, fenders, engine cradles and other parts for GM cars and trucks out of sheet metal, he explained. The work is dangerous enough when the machines are set up properly. When they let the equipment run down, it's even worse.

McComb said injuries ranging from minor cuts to serious lacerations and loss of fingers were part of the life of workers.

According to industry sources, press lines in a modern stamping plant can run 10 strokes a minute, 600 pieces an hour. Newer ones can produce 900 pieces an hour. New machinery and speedup made it possible for GM to increase productivity at its 13 stamping plants by more than 20 percent in 1997.

McComb said GM had removed dies from the plant during the Memorial Day weekend, They would have taken more but we stopped them, he told the World.

They forced the issue. We didn't ask for it but you gotta do what you gotta do, McComb said defiantly.

Seven production lines in the United States and Canada that depend on parts from the center had shut down as of June 10. Should the strike continue into a second week, GM will be forced to close 17 assembly plants, losing $300 million per week in profits.

UAW International President Stephen P. Yokich said that although the press portrays UAW members as the bad guys," the facts are otherwise.

We have to strike to get what we already won," he said, referring to GM's reneging on its promise to upgrade the Flint Metal Center by investing $300 million in the facility. Yokich added that while UAW membership had declined at GM plants, the remaining workers were producing more vehicles than ever before.

GM, which once controlled nearly 50 percent of the U.S. car and truck market, has less than 32 percent today. Bowing to demands of Wall Street, GM has set itself the goal of reducing production costs by $4 billion this year.

In order to accomplish this, the company has begun to turn the screws even tighter, using the threat to close a plant as "incentive" for the union to grant concessions. Since January 1994, the UAW, Canadian Auto Workers and the International Union of Electrical Workers have hit GM with 24 strikes.

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