The End of the United Auto Workers union

[Radical Activist]

http://www.energypublisher.com/article.asp?id=16991

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger has sung the company tune while autoworkers and retirees suffer. It's the swan song for labor union that once stood up to corporate giants.


...Regrettably, it is indisputable that Gettelfinger has been running the UAW as a company union and has used his power and influence against those he should be representing to race the clock back 70 years to evaporate all the gains. His tenure has been a C.E.O.’s dream and a nightmare for union members. He has volunteered and sacrificed members' pensions, jobs, health care, benefits, wages, work rules, and worker solidarity. He has become a corporate cheerleader “expecting continual worker sacrifices” and become the representative and facilitator for job destroying corporate restructuring, signing ongoing local “ New Operating Agreements” that evaporate long-standing job protections. He has allowed the companies to gut wages by replacing existing workers with new workers at half the wages.

[Ikonoklast]

1. Also written by Michael Westfall

American families are engaged in a cultural war that is profoundly damaging our nation. Because the bible condemns their motives, lifestyles and activities, special interest groups, including the homosexual agenda, the ACLU, the pornography industry, the liberal entertainment industry and other analogous pressure groups, have found that it is in their best interest to question and disregard biblical morality.

This site reflects on these and other relative societal issues using potent interviews, unique papers, special parody pieces and interesting guest writings from powerful conservatives in various arenas of life who are countering these forces and fighting for America's decency.

m.w.

From his blog. Guy is a nutjob self-professed anti-labor conservative asshat.

http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/

[Radical Activist]

5. Good to know.

I should have followed the link to his site first.

But if the criticism is fair we shouldn't dismiss it because of the source.

[DainBramaged]

8. His criticism IS fair, we LOST Superior Axle when Pullmyfinger folded

when they bluffed and moved production out of the country anyway. That's when I turned.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. That would be sad. The UAW was in the forefront of fighting for working people.

from Wikipedia..

The UAW was one of the first major unions that was willing to organize African-American workers. The UAW rapidly found success in organizing with the sit-down strike — first in a General Motors plant in Atlanta, Georgia in 1936, and more famously in the Flint sit-down strike that began on December 29, 1936. That strike ended in February 1937 after Michigan's governor Frank Murphy played the role of mediator, negotiating recognition of the UAW by General Motors. The next month, auto workers at Chrysler won recognition of the UAW as their representative in a sit-down strike.

...

At the UAW's constitutional convention in 1946 Walter Reuther won the election for president and served until his death in a small airplane accident in May 1970 — leading the union during one of the most prosperous periods for workers in U.S. history. In the 1960s, the UAW used its strategy of negotiating a contract with one major auto maker and applying it to others to secure a number of new benefits for auto workers, including fully paid hospitalization and sick leave benefits at General Motors and profit sharing in American Motors. The UAW also grew to include workers in other major industries such as the aerospace and agricultural-implement industries.

Water Reuther..
Toward the end of his life, when he took the UAW out of the AFL-CIO for a short-lived alliance with the Teamsters Union, and marched with the United Farm Workers in Delano, California, Reuther seemed to be dissatisfied, looking for the ability to challenge the injustices that had made the union movement so vital in the 1930s. He strongly supported the Civil Rights movement; Reuther was an active supporter of African American civil rights and participated in both the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs (August, 1963) and the Selma to Montgomery March (March, 1965). He stood beside Martin Luther King Jr. while he made the "I Have A Dream" speech, during the 1963 March on Washington. Although critical of the Vietnam War, he supported Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and met weekly with President Johnson during 1964-1965. He was instrumental in mobilizing UAW resources to minimize the threat that George Wallace would win more than 10 percent of union votes (Wallace won about 9 percent in the North).

[Radical Activist]

3. Once upon a time.

The last 20 years is another story.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-cutler6-2008dec06,0,1445437.story

It is not too late to save the Big Three. But the solution is not to tear down the historic and heroic gains won by prior generations of UAW workers. If there is hope long term -- for the unionized Big Three companies and for the UAW -- it rests in dealing with the unfinished business of the 1980s: unionizing the unorganized transplants.

[leftofthedial]

4. the right wing extremists have done a masterful job of gutting US unions

bastards.

[amborin]

6. he's only the latest in a long line of quiescent leaders

yokich was way worse

and reuther himself, yes, reuther, was terrible

[justgamma]

7. Didn't the members get a vote?

Every time they want to modify our contract, the members have to vote on it.

[DainBramaged]

9. How many times were we told it was the "best" they could get????

[dmosh42]

10. This is a result of 'free trading' since Reagan was in office.

The American people bought this policy, hook, line and sinker. While the rest of the civilized world kept their protections for their main industries, we made it so our workers had to try to compete against 'slave labor' wages. It doesn't work! As a life member of a union, CWA, I took a retirement some years ago. I moved to Florida, and after a while I noticed something. The other retirees down there were either owners of their own business, or ex-union people, like myself, with some benefits. I can't remember any people who had pensions, being from the 'right-to-work' states and were non-union. But we all thought we could become rich Republicans, and fucked up the whole system for decades to come.