[Excerpt] David Bensman\u27s  Concessions at South Works  in the Winter issue of Labor Research Review was an excellent recounting and analysis of the concessions process at United Steel workers Local 65. However, it misrepresents the nature of both the concessions and the concessions process in the United Auto Workers. Not only did the UAW\u27s contracts with Ford and General Motors fail to  provide  job security  as advertised, they were also arrived at by a process fully as manipulative  as that in the USWA

Slaughter, Jane

English

[Excerpt] David Bensman's "Concessions at South Works" in the Winter issue of Labor Research Review was an excellent recounting and analysis of the concessions process at United Steel workers Local 65. However, it misrepresents the nature of both the concessions and the concessions process in the United Auto Workers. Not only did the UAW's contracts with Ford and General Motors fail to  provide "job security" as advertised, they were also arrived at by a process fully as manipulative  as that in the USWA.Issue_3______Article_7.pdf: 337 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

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Concessions Bargaining in Auto

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Labor Research Review 
Volume 1 | Number 3 
Fighting Rust: Labor-Community Struggles in 
Smokestack America 
Article 3 
1983 
Concessions Bargaining in Auto 
Jane Slaughter 
Labor Notes, Detroit, MI 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@ILR. It has been accepted for inclusion 
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© 1983 by Labor Research Review 
Concessions Bargaining in Auto 
Abstract 
[Excerpt] David Bensman's "Concessions at South Works" in the Winter issue of Labor Research Review 
was an excellent recounting and analysis of the concessions process at United Steel workers Local 65. 
However, it misrepresents the nature of both the concessions and the concessions process in the United 
Auto Workers. Not only did the UAW's contracts with Ford and General Motors fail to provide "job security" 
as advertised, they were also arrived at by a process fully as manipulative as that in the USWA. 
Keywords 
concession, negotiation, collective bargaining, UAW, Ford, General Motors 
This article is available in Labor Research Review: https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/lrr/vol1/iss3/3 
70 Midwest Center for Labor Research 
Correspondence 
Concessions Bargaining in Auto 
David Bensman's "Concessions 
at South Works" in the Winter 
issue of Labor Research Review was 
an excellent recounting and 
analysis of the concessions process 
at United Steel workers Local 65. 
However, it misrepresents the 
nature of both the concessions and 
the concessions process in the 
United Auto Workers. Not only 
did the UAW's contracts with Ford 
and General Motors fail to provide 
"job security" as advertised, they 
were also arrived at by a process 
fully as manipulative as that in the 
USWA. 
Clearly the UAW's ratification 
process is more democratic than 
the Steelworkers' because the 
rank and file vote on contracts. But 
I believe the following points are relevant. 
(1) UAW President Douglas Fraser and GM Chairman Roger 
Smith had a secret agreement before Christmas 1981 that the 
contract would be reopened and concessions granted. This was 
revealed later. Fraser got the union's GM Council to vote for 
"talks" with GM under false pretenses in January 1982. Many GM 
Council members believed that Fraser was really going to talk 
about improved job security and not about concessions. 
(2) After the process was farther along, the International union 
hardly "developed a political dialogue that informed members 
about the issues." There was no debate in the pages of the 
UAW's magazine. The International put out misleading contract 
summaries which said that the contracts would put thousands of 
LABOR RESEARCH REVIEW 71 
members back to work. The headline on the Ford summary was 
"Breakthrough in Job Security/' The concessions, on the other 
hand, were presented as minor changes. Dropping nine Paid 
Personal Holidays per year (which directly caused the loss of 
thousands of jobs soon after the contract was signed) was given a 
small paragraph on the last page of the 10-page summary. 
Bensman may call such a summary "passionate advocacy"; I 
wouldn't call it being "informed about the issues." 
(3) The International union tried to intimidate the opposition to 
concessions, which, as least at GM, was considerable (a 48 per cent 
no vote on the contract). At the Ford council meeting, Fraser 
attacked oppositionist Al Gardner personally. Fraser said that 
Gardner, who is chairman of the Tool and Die Unit of Local 600, 
had "never engaged in any struggle or conflict or battle in his life," 
and threatened to "cut [his] ass up." After the Ford agreement 
was ratified, Fraser told Gardner, in a meeting of the union's 
skilled trades conference, that he would "tear [his] ass off because 
[he had] no balls." Not exactly conducive to a free and open 
debate. Some Canadian GM workers came to a U.S. GM Council 
meeting in Chicago. They had leaflets which used arguments 
widely used by the UAW leadership in Canada to try to convince 
their U.S. brothers and sisters not to take the concessions. The 
Canadians were not allowed to speak, had to sit in a special roped 
off section, and were subjected to derogatory remarks from the 
chair. 
(4) Fraser berated local union officials at GM who failed to push 
the contract hard enough with the membership. He implied that 
they were disloyal to the International and were only interested in 
being re-elected—since concessions were not popular with the 
membership. Further, he said that members who voted against 
concessions were being selfish, because they were refusing to help 
the unemployed. The 48 per cent no vote was a sad day for 
unionism, Fraser said. 
(5) At American Motors, the concessions contract was voted 
down, so the International sanctioned a re-vote after the ratification 
deadline. Violations of democracy and established procedure were 
so blatant that the Public Review Board, the union's watchdog 
body, is considering an AMC local's challenge to the ratification. 
Bensman also praises the UAW's "steps to gain 'job security' " 
through experimental "lifetime employment" projects and limited 
bans on plant closings. On "lifetime employment": I would main-
tain that it is not a concession from the company to promise to 
Midwest Center tor Labor Research 
retain the top 80 per cent of workers at two selected plants out of 
many, especially when those workers need not be retained at UAW 
wages or at those plants, and even more especially when the 
affected locals agree to big work rule changes as part of the new 
"cooperative relationship." The ban on plant closings only 
prohibits shutdowns attributable to "outsourcing/' and then only 
until April 1984. Both GM's plan to buy 200,000 subcompacts from 
Isuzu and its recent deal with Toyota will cost American jobs—and 
both are completely legal under the contract. The point here is not 
to berate the UAW for failing to win control over GM's investment 
plans—how could it, when it was making concessions? The point is 
that the UAW misled the membership when it claimed its contracts 
would provide job security. 
Recently, Ford threatened to close its Edison, New Jersey plant if 
the local didn't grant concessions (it did). This kind of threat is 
actually encouraged by the contract, which spells out how locals 
can reopen their local agreements to "bid" for work—including 
against each other. 
The most important point about the UAW's concessions 
agreements, however, is not their content nor the process by 
which they were ratified. It is their effect on the rest of the U.S. 
labor movement. The union's second set of concessions to 
Chrysler, though mandated by the Federal Loan Guarantee Board, 
set up a wave of concessions in other unions. Its third set, in 
January 1981, started an avalanche. And when concessions were 
made to profitable GM in April 1982, the word was out: if GM can 
get concessions, anybody can get concessions. Many staffers from 
other unions have told me: "after Chrysler, everything changed." 
American unions did not make concessions during our last 
recession—and employers did not ask for them. I believe that the 
reason they were emboldened to ask this time is that the unions 
gave the signal that the answer would be yes. 
Jane Slaughter 
Labor Notes, 
Detroit, Mi. 
Jane Slaughter is a staff writer for Labor Notes, a national monthly published in 
Detroit. She is author of a forthcoming book on "CONCESSIONS—and how to 
beat them" (for information on ordering, write Labor Notes, P.O. Box 20001, 
Detroit, Michigan 48220). 


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