Autoworkers Plan Auto Show Protest
Disgruntled workers want bigger share of industry turnaround.
by Joseph Szczesny on Jan.04, 2011
http://www.thedetroitbureau.com/2011/01/autoworkers-plan-auto-show-protest/Disgruntled auto workers are planning to demonstrate outside the North American International Auto Show again this year just as United Auto Workers President Bob King is scheduled to launch a charm offensive the union’s top brass hope will coax workers from non-union plants into joining the UAW.
The demonstration is set for January 9, the day before the Detroit Auto Show’s official press days.
The disgruntled workers are demanding greater militancy from King and the rest of the union leadership, which has committed to finding a way to compromise with executives at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler as well as other automakers. The UAW has made numerous concessions since 2007, when the last round of domestic contract negotiations took place – and the protests will argue that workers now deserve some of those concession back in light of the profits being rolled up by Detroit’s Big Three.
Automakers, on the other hand will be under pressure to protect their new profits in order to pay off debt and to satisfy investors, looking for their own share of the carmakers income.
The contrast on display at the auto show is very likely to shape the union’s approach to the negotiations with the domestic carmakers later this year. King is expected to ask for a larger share of company profits in an effort to appease his critics inside the union.
“Auto companies are claiming a big turn-around, but what is ahead for autoworkers?” asked Wendy Thompson, a retired auto worker, former local union officer and one of the organizers of the demonstration.
“While CEOs at the auto show will be full of bravado over billions in profits, they are hiring, for the most part, temporary workers. When they do hire permanent workers, it will be under a two-tier pay structure — new hires will earn $14 an hour — near the poverty rate for a family of four,” said.
Thompson also said, “The U.S-Korea free trade agreement in no way represents fair trade.” Instead the agreement, which has been endorsed by King and the UAW, will wind up hurting workers in the United States or Korea, she predicted.
“While worker productivity has soared over the past decades, workers haven’t benefited. It is time to put workers back to work,” she argued.
“In the 1950s the government subsidized the expansion of the auto industry with a massive highway construction program; today we need a government program to support mass transit and develop renewable energy,” she said
“We can manufacture buses, light rail and high-speed trains as well as wind and water turbines and solar panels along with environment-friendly cars and trucks,” she said.
“For the past twenty years, corporate America, with the aid of one-sided trade agreements, have managed to undermine the economic security of working people destroying entire communities,” said David Dabney, a member of UAW Local 23 in Indianapolis, Ind.
