Flint strikes over: GM workers win!

By Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the August 1, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

It may have taken strikes of 54 days, but in the end some 10,000 members of United Auto Workers Locals 651 and 659 in Flint, Mich. made good on their pledge of "one day longer" and forced General Motors to pull in its horns on July 28.

The strikes, the first at the Flint Metal Center on June 5 and the second at the nearby Delphi East parts plant on June 11, forced the world's largest manufacturing corporation to close 27 of its 29 assembly plants in North America and an unknown number of parts and supplier plants, eventually idling nearly 200,000 workers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Rank-and-file union members voted to accept the proposed agreement by 90-percent-plus margins at ratification meetings on July 29. Both plants resumed operation with Wednesday's second shift. Resumption of production in most other plants idled by the strike is expected to resume early this month.

The first major breakthrough came on July 26, when a convoy of more than a dozen 18-wheelers, led by Local 659 strike committee vice chair "Red" Jarad, drove into the Flint Metal Center to return dies hi-jacked from the plant over the Memorial Day weekend.

Pickets "hi-fived" the drivers while others shouted and whistled as they waved their green "On Strike" placards and hugged each other.

"They might have taken [the dies] out with a scab outfit but they brought them back with union drivers," a local union officer told the World. "Otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed in."

GM removed the dies because Local 659 had announced its intention to strike over local health and safety issues and production standards. Many saw the move as a deliberate provocation, meant to test the ability of the union to defend its members' jobs.

The dies were of particular significance because they are meant to stamp out body panels for a new line of pickup trucks that GM will launch in 1999. Thus they were seen as "job insurance" for the Flint workers.

In the early stages of the final round of negotiations, GM promised to return the dies after a settlement had been reached. The union rejected this proposal, demanding, instead, that they be returned before any settlement could be reached. GM blinked and the dies were returned on July 26, two days before the strike ended.

GM has been under growing pressure from major Wall Street investors, who are demanding that GM adopt ruthless cost-cutting measures that include lopping at least 50,000 workers from its payrolls and closing four stamping plants.

Under terms of the agreement GM agreed to keep three parts plants - Delphi East and two others in Dayton, Ohio - open until January 1, 2000; to make promised investments at the Flint stamping plant; and to pay all GM workers idled by the strike a week's pay of approximately $800 that would have been due when GM laid off production workers for the first two weeks of July during "model changeover."

GM also agreed to drop a lawsuit that could have cost the union billions of dollars and both sides agreed to set aside the issue of the strikes' legality, which had been sent to binding arbitration.

GM claimed that the strikes were illegal because the UAW was using them to deal with broader issues of investment and other issues that could only be subjects of negotiation when the national contract expires in September 1999.

Many corporate analysts shared the hope of Paine Webber's Michael P. Ward who told the Wall Street Journal that "the market expected GM to deliver a knockout blow and they didn't."

Rather, GM was forced to withdraw its lawsuit against the UAW in the face of losses in excess of $3 billion that were accruing at the rate of nearly $100 million weekly. GM stocks rebounded by more than a dollar a share the day after the agreement to end the strike.

Joseph Lovvorn, president of a 3,000-member UAW/GM local in Athens Ga., spoke for many when he pointed out that the underlying cause of the Flint strikes - GM's determination to downsize U.S. operations while building new facilities in countries as far away as China and Eastern Europe - were unresolved, thus pointing to a tough fight in 1999 negotiations when contracts with GM, Ford and Chrysler expire.

"I think it'll be real tough," he said. "As soon as [things settle down] the UAW members of GM need to start preparing [for the next round]."

While hailing the agreement that ended the strikes, Kendall Martin, who works at the Flint Metal Center, said it is "a little hard to get excited. We're going to have to be back out [on the picket line in 1999] and next time GM is going to be more prepared to stay out even longer." He said he was going to set aside a "few thousand" as his personal strike insurance.