The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.18           May 5, 1997 
 
 
Auto Workers Strike Another GM Plant  

BY HOLLY HARKNESS
PONTIAC, Michigan - Another battlefront in the struggle between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers (Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors) opened here at midnight April 22. Six thousand members of UAW Local 594 walked out of the General Motors Truck Group plant here after months of negotiations for a local contract broke down.

The GM Truck Group includes the Pontiac East assembly plant where 4,100 union members build the full-sized and extended cab Chevrolet CK and GM Sierra pickup trucks on three shifts.

The UAW and GM reached agreement on a national contract last fall, but 30 local contracts still have not been settled. General Motors, which trails its competitors in productivity, is trying to cut jobs at many plants. At the Truck Group, GM claims their operations are "overstaffed." But Local 594 is demanding that 600 jobs be added to the assembly line.

The local struck for six days in April 1995 over similar demands. They won an agreement for union members to staff a Lear Corp. plant in nearby Rochester Hills, where seats for the trucks are built. But the union claims that the company has reneged on a second agreement to stop outsourcing work from unionized engineering operations in the Truck Group.

Lee Allen, a 31-year sanitation worker, was on the picket lines the first day of the strike. Salaried personnel were driving in and out of the plant all day. One particularly aggressive driver knocked Allen over as he barreled into the driveway. Allen was not seriously hurt, he said, but pickets noted the license plate number and reported the incident to the local police and the union.

About 40 percent of GM's truck production comes from Pontiac East. The assembly line builds more than 7,000 vehicles each week.

Each extended-cab pickup truck sold can bring as much as $8,000 in profit for GM. But GM official Jack Smith has declared that the company is willing to weather these kinds of strikes to get the job cuts they need to improve their bottom line. Negotiations were set to resume April 24.

Meanwhile, local strikes continue at GM's Oklahoma City assembly plant and at Chrysler's Mound Road Engine Plant in Detroit. A total of 31,400 workers are idled from all three strikes.

The Oklahoma City strike by 3,500 UAW members is in its third week with no settlement in sight. The union is fighting to keep 500 out of 900 jobs cut by the company when the production of the new Chevrolet Malibu and the Oldsmobile Cutlass began. The Oakland Press reported that workers at GM's assembly plant in Wilmington, Delaware, where the Malibu is also built, have started an informal slowdown to protest personnel shortages there and to support the strikers in Oklahoma City.

And a major showdown is shaping up at Chrysler, where 22,000 workers in Canada, Mexico, and the United States have now been laid off as a result of the strike by 1,800 members of UAW Local 51 at the Mound Road Engine plant. The union is opposing the company's plans to send drive shaft production to a Dana Corp. nonunion parts plant. The move would cost the union 250 jobs.

The strike began April 11. No face-to-face meetings had been held between the local and the company as of April 23. Like GM, Chrysler is showing that is it willing to take a multimillion dollar loss in the strike in order to push the union back on the issue of outsourcing jobs. Chrysler already outsources more production work than GM or Ford, but nowhere near as much as its Japanese competitors.

Holly Harkness is a member of UAW Local 235 in Detroit.  
 
 
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