The class-action suit, filed August 7 in the U.S. District Court, began with 21 plaintiffs from United Auto Workers Local 594. It charges that the settlement of the 1997 strike at the Pontiac General Motors truck plant was delayed to get the sons of UAW officials hired, and that some members of the Local 594 bargaining committee accepted bribes in the form of unjustified overtime payments in the amount of $200,000.

A major demand of the 87-day strike was that GM hire 600 more workers to end the overtime that was being forced on the 6,000 workers in the plant. The workers were also denied earned vacations and days off.

The strike was one of several against the big automakers in the summer of 1997. Combined with a strike against a GM plant in Oklahoma City, it cost GM nearly $500 million by stopping the production of more than 70,000 pickup trucks. The strike ended when the company agreed to hire more workers, putting a brake for a time on their drive to cut thousands of jobs.

The real target of the lawsuit is the UAW, not General Motors. The suit seeks $50 million in compensatory damages from GM and the UAW, and $500 million in punitive damages from the UAW. The suit challenges the right of auto workers to run their own union without government interference.

The Detroit Free Press, notorious for its several-year union-busting drive against the newspaper workers' unions, reports that the FBI and U.S. Department of Labor investigation goes back two years but was intensified this summer as the lawsuit was filed. According to the press reports, union members say federal investigators and GM attorneys were inside the plant during the scheduled two-week shutdown in July, seizing and studying internal UAW documents from the 1997 strike. The investigation was prompted in part by allegations by UAW Concern, a group based in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  
 
Big-business media backs probe
Support for the federal probe and the antiunion lawsuit is being encouraged by the daily big-business newspapers here. In a front-page article entitled "UAW workers flock to join GM suit," the Detroit Free Press reports that more than 100 additional workers at GM's Pontiac plant signed up in the class-action lawsuit. They are each paying $100 to help fund it. The organizers of the lawsuit plan to pass out hundreds of donation and sign-up forms in the Pontiac East truck plant, which employs 3,400 workers.

In the same issue, the Detroit Free Press ran an incendiary editorial entitled "Sellout? UAW members need to know what bargainers did." The editorial began, "The old adage says where there's smoke, there's fire. And there is enough smoke pouring from the Solidarity House headquarters of the United Auto Workers to have federal investigators hunting for flames."

"One way to clear the smoke is to deal with the fire," the big-business paper concludes, backing the government intervention into union affairs.