Once again, the UAW-Transplant battle has produced the most memorable auto-related quote today, as union boss Bob King tells Reuters

If we don’t organize the transnationals, I don’t think there is a long-term future for the UAW

The stakes in the UAW’s crusade were already high, but with this latest gem, King confirms that that it’s all or nothing. Which is an interesting way to frame a campaign that even the objective reporters at Reuters are forced to conclude is something of a fool’s errand. After all, it’s not as if the UAW hasn’t tried to organize transplant factories before, and they have yet to come close to succeeding. But with the rhetoric turned up to “11,” the UAW is on a one-way trip to destiny… and King’s best last-minute pitch to the defiant transplants is

We want to be on the cutting edge of labor relations. That is the opportunity for all these companies.

A tempting idea, to be sure, but now that King has informed the world that the union’s alternative to success is death, the transplants have more incentive than ever to say “thanks, but no thanks.” And it’s already starting. Is this the beginning of the end of the United Auto Workers?

Last week, UAW boss Bob King revealed that his campaign to organize transplant auto factories had already begun with talks between his organizers and the factory operators. And though King suggested that his campaign would include the labeling of uncooperative automakers as human rights abusers, he refused to say which automakers he was speaking with, telling Reuters

We are in some preliminary discussions which we agreed to keep confidential so we will do that

But apparently not all the transplants are playing ball… both in terms of the discussions themselves as well as King’s commitment to confidentiality. Unfazed by King’s threats, Honda tells Bloomberg [via Kausfiles]

Honda has had no dialogue with the UAW and has no interest in a discussion with them. The issue of union representation is ultimately one for our associates to decide and, for more than three decades, Honda associates have spoken loudly and clearly by choosing to reject UAW outreach efforts.

Your move, UAW.

As the biggest week in the American auto industry, the annual North American International Auto Show in Detroit regularly attracts a sideshow of protesters bent on sending a message to the hordes of executives and analysts who cram Cobo Hall. In 2009, UAW members marched against the possibility that the auto bailout (then still a work-in-progress) would require union concessions. Last year, Tea Party groups rallied to protest the government’s ownership of GM and Chrysler, while UAW members counter-rallied in support of the bailout (apparently those concessions weren’t so bad). This year will be no exception to the trend, as dissident UAW members will be protesting the union’s two-tier wage system, a pre-bailout concession that has created considerable controversy of late. And they’ll be getting support (if only in word, not action) from across their friends from the North, as the Canadian Auto Worker boss has recently called for an end to the two-tier system, saying

That has to be a strategy of the UAW to gradually get out of the two-tiered system. I don’t know if it can happen overnight, but they’ve got to start sending signals to future employees that the low, tiered wages are not something that can sustain families long term

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With some 60k Italian jobs and a $20b investment at stake, Fiat’s “Fabbrica Italia” renovation of its home-country production plans are crucial to the integration of Fiat and Chrysler. And rather than negotiating a national labor agreement with Italy’s fractious unions, Fiat has been revamping its Italian plants on a case-by-case basis. This strategy has already backfired at the firm’s Naples-based Pomigliano plant, where the Italian metalworker’s union Fiom decried Fiat’s plans as “discriminatory.” Since then, Fiat has moved onto its Mirafiori plant in Turin, where Fiat wants to build the next-generation Compass/Patriot models for Chrysler and a derivative SUV for Alfa-Romeo on the firm’s new “Compact Wide” platform. And once again, Fiom is up to its old tricks. The WSJ reports that every other union has approved the new Mirafiori deal with Fiat, except Fiom, which has been banned from representing workers at the plant, pending a January vote by workers. However, Fiom represents some 22 percent of Mirafiori workers, and the union has announced an eight-hour strike for January 28.

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As Bob King and the United Auto Workers gear up for their January organizing campaign aimed at converting transplant automakers to the union way, the UAW is picking up support from outside the automotive industry. Automotive News [sub] reports that Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition has expressed its interest in organizing the non-union auto assembly plants, and that the Detroit bureau of the NAACP has pledged assistance as well, offering to request assistance from its national leadership. Even the Ohio-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which organizes migrant farm workers, has said it would join the fight if King asks. And though AN’s writeup uses the imagery of conflict to describe King’s “soldiers,” King insists that its strategy is not confrontational. As far as the President of the UAW is concerned,

Transplant workers in the South will want to be part of this “winning team,” King said.

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year, as the Detroit automakers reach for their checkbooks and write out annual cost-of-living adjustment bonus checks, known fondly among workers as the annual “Christmas Bonus.” This year, GM, Ford and Chrysler will pay out $305m in these COLA “bonus” checks… but, in classic UAW style, you can only get one if you no longer work. Yes, you got that right: if you are a salaried or hourly worker currently employed by GM, there will be no COLA bonus this year… or even next year. If, however, you are one of the lucky GM retirees who never had to face the modern challenges of two-tier wages and a near-bankruptcy experience, check your mailbox because there should be a $700 check waiting there to make your Christmas a little brighter. After all, retirees are the future of every company… right? [via Automotive News [sub]]

Automotive News [sub] reports that GM is bringing out its first round of buyouts since emerging from government-structured bankruptcy a year and a half ago. The General is offering skilled trades workers at 13 plants some $60,000 a head to leave the company, as the firm tries to cut down its ranks of skilled trade workers, of which it has “several thousand” too many. Qualifying workers who have already reached retirement age will receive $60k and full benefits, while younger workers will have to give up retiree benefits to qualify for the buyout. The offer is good at 13 GM plants, eight of which are closed, on standby, or scheduled to close, including Orion Assembly, where 40 percent of the recalled workers have been bumped into the UAW’s second tier typically reserved for new hires (or pushed to another factory to piss off yet more workers). GM hasn’t announced how many buyouts it is looking for in the current round, but with nearly half of Orion’s workers alone facing a 50 percent pay cut (and the UAW pushing for buyouts for months now), it seems likely that GM will be able to convince a whole mess of workers to leave their jobs. Especially if there are more “innovative provisions” coming down the pipe.

Unable to provide meaningful representation to its dwindling membership, the United Auto Workers is continuing its post-bailout strategy of poking its nose into everyone else’s business with a protest planned for today at the Hyundai America Technical Center in Ann Arbor, MI. While its own workers face the aftermath of a bailout that saw tens of US plants shut down, the UAW opines on the Korean situation in a release which notes:

Frustrated by their temporary status, auto workers at a Hyundai Motor Co.mpany plant in Ulsan, South Korea, declared a strike on Nov. 15, and one desperate worker set himself on fire in protest of the company’s refusal to offer secure jobs. About 500 workers have since led an occupation of various plants in the Hyundai compound… To anyone interested in workplace fairness, the resolution of the Ulsan Hyundai workers’ strike is critical. It could either speed up progress toward ensuring global living wages, or provide a green light on the race to the bottom the auto industry began years ago – — with Toyota and Hyundai getting a head start.

One must, however, point out that the UAW has made its fair share of contributions to recent declines in auto worker wages. After all, it forced nearly half of GM’s Orion Assembly plant workforce to take a 40 percent wage cut in order to build a politically-popular fuel-efficient subcompact (the next-gen Aveo) in the US. Not only did this represent an unconscionable screwing of its own union “brothers” but it also directly hurts the Korean workers the UAW now so self-righteously defends by by stealing jobs using the very same “race to the bottom” that it decries. Besides, the labor situation in Korea is a bit more complex than the UAW’s Manichean moralizing makes it out to be…
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GM’s stock may be hovering near its IPO price of $3/share, but the UAW doesn’t need much more growth to cash out with every penny it wanted from GM. The UAW’s VEBA account has banked $3.4b in stock sales so far, and Forbes reports

The VEBA will break even on its investment if it can sell the remaining 206 million shares at an average price of $36.96.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, need GM’s stock to top at least $52/share in order to break even on the bailout that it funded. Because it’s just not a bailout unless the least deserving benefit the most. Meanwhile, with its accounts once again flush with cash, the UAW is turning South in hopes of accomplishing what it has never accomplished before: unionizing at ransplant auto factory in a right-to-work, Southern state.

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Let me say this as clear as I can, I do not think there will be any concessions in 2011. People want to reward our members and it will be a key component of the 2011 bargaining. When the industry comes back, just like we’re sharing in the downside we’re going to share in the upside. That’s a key foundation of what we’re doing in 2011.

UAW President Bob King gives his best “we will fight them on the beaches” impression, telling Reuters that his union has sacrificed enough, thanks. And though the people who want to reward UAW members are notably absent from public debate, that assertion wasn’t nearly as double-take-worthy as King’s opinion that

There’s no competitive gap between Ford, GM and Chrysler right now

Huh?

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Even though Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne’s disparaging comments about its over-reliance on Italian manufacturing have opened the door for more US manufacturing opportunities, United Auto Workers boss Bob King wants to make it clear that he won’t be taking advantage of Fiat’s rift with its Italian unions. Fiat tells Automotive News [sub] that failure to secure Italian union agreement with its new manufacturing plan could send increased production to Serbia, Poland and even the United States. King’s response [via Michigan Public Radio]:

They (automakers) won’t be pitting one worker in one country against another. We’re going to be part of working with our global partners in other unions and building a global middle class – and rebuild the American middle class, really.

Yes, in the brutally competitive international labor market, there is a way for everyone to win… really.

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The Freep reports

A laid-off worker at General Motor’s Orion Assembly plant has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in Detroit against the UAW for negotiating a deal to employ 40% of the workers at a lower wage rate.

Nick Waun, 31, of Lapeer said the UAW negotiated the agreement without giving workers a chance to consider it.

“The main thrust of this is to try to get a vote on the agreement, because they denied us a vote,” Waun said.

You don’t say? Didn’t see that one coming. No sir. But will the NLRB be sympathetic to the UAW’s well-reasoned position that some union brothers are more equal than others? Or is the union’s nominal ownership (by way of its VEBA benefits trust) of some 60 percent of GM’s equity possibly, just possibly, incompatible with the duties of a union? It’s a head-scratcher all right.

I took some flack from TTAC’s Best and Brightest on Monday when I suggested that the UAW’s deal to give 40 percent of Orion Assemblys returning workers a 50 percent pay cut was “cowardly and despicable.” What I didn’t make clear enough was that I have no problem with the UAW working for a lower wage as long as the burden was spread evenly. Instead, the union has arbitrarily divided its existing workforce into the old guard “haves” and the relatively-recently-hired “have nots” as a ploy to make the union seem capable of profitably building subcompact cars in America. It’s bad enough to prop up the old guard by paying new hires less, but cramming down recalled Tier One workers is totally contrary to the very concept of a union. And I’m not the only one who finds the lack of solidarity and shared responsibility within the union troubling.

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Another day, another story on the ever-growing conflict between the UAW’s ownership stake in GM and responsibility to its members. Pre-bankruptcy, GM didn’t have to deal with the fact that the UAW is incapable of building fuel-efficient subcompact cars profitably. As a result, the outgoing Aveo was built and designed in Korea as the Daewoo Kalos, before being fitted with a bowtie and shipped to the US. But now that the General has promised to build the next-gen Aveo in Michigan’s Orion Township plant in exchange for nearly $800m in local tax credits (not to mention the political benefits of “saving or creating” hundreds of union jobs), it’s up to the UAW to square the circle and make the damn thing profitable. Which, according to Automotive News [sub] is just what they’ve done… by bumping 40 percent of the plant’s previous workers to the new “tier two” wages. Which is a nice way of saying “cutting their wages in half.” How is that possible?

The UAW’s 2009 amended contract with GM just before bankruptcy called for “innovative labor agreement provisions” that would allow GM to make a small car profitably in the United States.

Under those “innovative provisions” (which just happened to be conjured up when the government task force was elbow-deep in GM), Orion workers can neither appeal the decision nor go on strike over it. Either the UAW wants to be a union capable of building small cars profitably, or it doesn’t. Screwing less-senior “brothers” so politicians and union bosses can crow over the “green jobs” at Orion is cowardly and despicable.

In 2007, the United Auto Workers came to a defining decision: rather than sharing sacrifice equally in the spirit of solidarity, the union divided its membership into two tiers. Tier one was the old guard, existing UAW workers who continued to receive relatively generous wages. Tier two was made up of all new hires, who were paid about half what their tier one “brothers” made. As the bankruptcy and bailout of GM and Chrysler brought the UAW’s internal divisions to the fore, second-tier workers have become more and more vocal about their second-class status. The excellent Changing Gears project (a “public media conversation about the future of the industrial Midwest”) speaks with several second-tier workers about the challenges and frustrations of earning half as much as their union brethren. In the words of one worker

There’s a joke within the two tier people, that if two two-tier people died in a fire, they’d say “one GM employee lost.”  You feel like half an employee… It’s not like we have to wear a badge.. or drink out of a seperate drinking fountain, it’s just, you know every day that when you go in there, the life these people have made for themselves is something you’ll never have.