UNION BLUES

...The director of Region 10, for example, reprimanded the president of Milwaukee Local 438 after the local's newspaper reprinted an article in which I criticized the UAW's 1987 General Motors national agreement...

...Under the programs, local union presidents or shop committee chairs can appoint people to full-time jobs walking around the plant instead of working on the line...

...Worley illegally appointed delegates at six local unions to cast their votes for him, though delegates are supposed to be elected by the members of their local...

...UAW members who felt they had been wronged by union officials had access to a unique appeals process...

...A vote for the bargaining resolution, on the other hand, would conclude the business of the convention, and it did...

...The challenger was the assistant director of the region, Jerry Tucker, who answered a plea from several local officers to run on a pledge of "New Directions in the UAW...

...it is shared by a large part of the membership...

...Nationally, less than 50 per cent of the membership voted on that national agreement, down from 73 per cent only five years earlier...

...The same charge could now be leveled at the UAW...

...Statements made that this union is undemocratic...

...When he was editor of the local's newspaper, Marquart had to take copy to the regional director's office for approval during elections...

...Schrade, who was a member of the IEB from 1962 to 1972 and an assistant to Walter Reuther for ten years before that, says the ninety-day rule was adopted to close off the election process, not open it up...

...Two years ago, the UAW provided an example of the lengths to which a governing union clique will go to maintain its monopoly on power...

...What Kerr did not discuss, however, was the extent to which one-party union governments would strive to continue their rule by denying local autonomy and free, contested elections...

...That is why local autonomy is so important...

...The resolution, which had been submined by several locals, called on the UAW's International Executive Board to enforce a constitutional provision that barred any local union from agreeing to an inferior contract in order to take work away from a rival local...

...In 1957, Clark Kerr, a member of the UAW's first Public Review Board, wrote a booklet entitled Unions and Union Leaders of Their Own Choosing, in which he noted that most unions in this country have been run by one-party leadership but that some have nonetheless managed to be "reasonably responsive to membership desires...

...Traditionally, a local union negotiates such work rules as job classifications and safety requirements...

...At Wentzville, there are more than 100 appointed jobs in a work force of about 3,000...

...Department of Labor at a special Region 5 convention, and the results weren't even close: Tucker won by a vote of 362.174 to 327.826...

...There's no support for the importance of a domestic industrial base by policymakers in Washington...

...However, the international has been chipping away at local autonomy for years...

...And the Board said that was all right...

...The real problem, he insists, is that "the conditions in which the UAW operates have changed____Domestic makers have only 70 per cent of the market and they're shrinking rapidly...

...When the UAW was trying to reform the AFL-CIO, President Walter Reuther and other top UAW officers charged that "basic provisions of the constitution of the AFL-CIO have been violated...

...a couple of months later, the executive board reversed its decision after the UAW's magazine, Solidarity, called for support for the paperworkers...

...Officially, these members are working on quality, or attendance, or a training program, but the feeling of workers at my plant in Wentzville, Missouri, as well as at Frey's, is that the appointees "don't do anything" and have simply been given political patronage...

...Fraser also explains that there are no minutes recording the adoption of the ninety-day rule, contrary to the requirements of the UAW constitution, because the decision was made in an off-the-record "good-and-welfare session" of the International Executive Board...

...The internal life of the UAW seemed to confirm the assertion in the preamble to the union's constitution that workers could "participate meaningfully in making decisions affecting their welfare and that of the communities in which they live...

...Former UAW president Doug Fraser, who says he chaired the committee that developed this ninety-day rule in 1972, claims it was intended to democratize the process...

...Lately, the international has added a new twist to its efforts to curtail local autonomy...

...The members and their local unions were left high and dry by the UAW...

...Hammer points out that attendance at union meetings is usually low, so that the person who makes the appointments can control the local by packing meetings and instructing his appointees in how to vote...

...Members took an active role in union affairs...

...Officers of the international denied the charges...

...Another threat to membership control is emerging from the 1987 General Mo-tors-UAW national agreement, which established "jointness" as the centerpiece of labor-management relations...

...Fraser is not familiar with the joint programs in the current GM-UAW contract...

...The main response was, "Why should I vote...

...Frey's local, with 7,000 members, has more than 300 appointed positions—about one for every twenty-three members...

...I have no problem with dissent, but you have to operate within the rules," he recently told reporters...

...machine' was very much evident...

...Those programs that don't do that should be abolished...

...must symbolize in its internal structure and procedures the fundamental values of the democratic process to insure that its programs, policies, and activities reflect the high moral and social objectives of labor's cause...

...In some of those contests, successful challenges were mounted by members of the UAW staff against incumbents supported by the union's ruling caucus...

...free and democratic labor movement in a free society...

...And when the convention refused to certify Worley's election, Bieber overruled the vote and installed Worley as director of Region 5. Last April, Federal District Judge Richard Suhrheinrich ruled in Detroit that the Region 5 election had been tainted by the votes of the illegally appointed delegates and by the use of UAW funds to support Worley's campaign...

...Much of this still goes on...

...Conventions were often free-for-alls at which delegates vigorously debated—and sometimes rejected—the recommendations of President Walter Reuther and the union's International Executive Board...

...The international's top leadership is striving for accommodation with management when it needs to restore the UAW's former accommodation with the union's own membership...

...Through the local, members can "send a message" to the international union...

...Jack Stieber's book, Governing the UAW, published in 1962, records forty-seven contested elections for the post of regional director in the preceding fifteen years...

...Local 909 was unusual only in that it successfully resisted pressure for concessions from both the corporation and the international union...

...Sally Bier, the president of one of the striking locals and the most active strike leader, was not on the administration's "team," so she was denied help offered by a Labor Crisis Support Committee and by other unions...

...He says, however, that the purpose of joint programs is to "democratize the workplace...

...people who before thought they had no chance to beat the system...

...At the union's collective-bargaining convention last April, which I attended as an observer, Wendy Thompson, a delegate from Local 235 in Ham-tramck, Michigan, took the floor to move that a resolution to block whipsawing—the pitting of local union against local union in the same company—be reported out of committee...

...Such union activists as David Frey of Local 735 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, contend that the emphasis on jointness results in neglect of members' grievances and lax contract enforcement...

...Aside from conventions, the local union is the main arena for membership involvement in the UAW...

...He argued that union democracy could be sustained by having autonomous local affiliates and contested elections in which the opposition did not need to fear retaliation...

...Critics charge that the UAW's internal procedures no longer reflect democratic values...

...In his book, An Autoworker's Journal, Frank Marquart described the situation as it had evolved through the early 1960s...

...At the special convention, reported The Wall Street Journal, "the image of'movement' vs...

...In the end, only 17 per cent of the local membership bothered to vote...

...In the mid-1960s, the UAW had won the respect of a new generation of workers and social activists with its active support for organizing farmworkers and especially with its struggle to democratize the AFL-CIO...

...When Local 909, at GM's Hydramatic plant in Warren, Michigan, was asked to adopt a "team concept" that eliminated job classifications and seniority rights, the membership had to vote it down three times and picket a UAW regional office to obtain a local agreement that didn't contain the concessions...

...It passed...

...Frey, who was elected president of his local in 1987, concedes that the union has an obligation to help insure quality in the workplace, but it "also has an obligation to see that employees have jobs with justice...

...UAW officials often pointed to this Public Review Board as the union's unique guarantor of internal democracy and membership rights, and urged other unions to create similar institutions...

...They could take their complaints to a board of respected citizens, "outsiders" who constituted a kind of supreme court for the union...

...His supporters claimed that staff representatives of the international union offered jobs to delegates in return for votes, threatened to stop processing local union grievances, and even physically assaulted delegates who backed Tucker...

...When committee members fail to check the abuses that are bound to accompany management's drive for greater productivity, Fraser says, the union "is in trouble...

...Union Blues In the UAW, democracy is on the line BY PETER DOWNS There was a time when the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers—the UAW—enjoyed a reputation as America's preeminent industrial union...

...But the UAW lost that fight and left the labor federation...

...UAW members are inclined to think things were better in the past than now," he says, "and that's reinforced by their daily experience...

...The perception that something is wrong in the UAW is not limited to a handful of dissident activists...

...It is one of the reasons most frequently cited by members for not participating in union affairs...

...Opposition candidates were given no space in the paper...

...In October 1987, for example, the vice president of my local and I spent a shift walking through the plant and talking to everyone on the assembly line, urging members to vote on the national agreement...

...Frank Hammer, who was elected president of Local 909 in 1987, says that the joint programs "are incredibly dangerous to union democracy...

...Laarman, the UAW's public-relations director, says Tucker was fired for violating the union's rule that any staff member who decides to run against an incumbent for an international office must take an unpaid leave and declare his or her candidacy at least ninety days before the election...

...Last April, in an action symptomatic of the UAW's decline, its vaunted watchdog, the Public Review Board, concluded that the UAW is "a one-party institution not in all respects unlike that found in many national governments in which a single political party controls the government, and the officials who formally make and administer the laws pursuant to which the country is governed are selected wholly by that party...

...Today, however, many activists within and outside the UAW say the union no longer lives up to its noble reputation...

...Like Frey, he believes appointments to shop committees should be made on a nonpolitical basis...

...Yet, the workings of jointness may already be muffling such dissident voices as Frey's...

...Bob Berghoff, former president of local 148, which represents 12,000 McDonnell Douglas workers in Long Beach, California, says the UAW leadership has become "an embarrassment to the labor movement" by forcing members to accept unjustifiable concessions...

...The text of the agreement still has not been released to UAW members...

...Earlier than most other unions, the UAW supported the civil-rights movement, consumer interests, and environmental protection...

...They're just going to do whatever they want anyway...

...An informal group of members passed out fliers suggesting a picket of the regional office or Solidarity House [the UAW headquarters], but an international representative scared them off by threatening to cut off their strike benefits and have them arrested for trespassing...

...Good-and-welfare sessions, adds Schrade, used to be called "good and welfare of the political order...

...One of the appointees says that after the election the shop chair said "he'd be keeping an eye on me because my job didn't get him any votes...

...But criticism of UAW's international officers and their policies doesn't come only from auto workers...

...The UAW has tried to justify Bieber's 1986 retaliation against Tucker with an explanation that Paul Schrade, a former member of the International Executive Board, has likened to the "falsification of history practiced by certain other one-party governments...

...UAW breakthroughs set the pace for labor gains in such areas as pensions, supplemental unemployment benefits, and cost-of-living adjustments...

...In 1987, a thirteen-week strike by 4,000 organized clerical workers against Michigan Blue Cross/Blue Shield offered a curious contrast to the solidarity rhetoric of the UAW's administration caucus...

...When the IEB keeps its actions secret, he says, it prevents the members from governing the union...

...they were meetings of the UAW's ruling caucus...

...Bieber insisted that the matter was already covered in an administration-sponsored resolution, but Thompson refused to budge and demanded a vote on her motion...

...In the election for director of the UAW's Region 5 (which encompasses Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico), the incumbent was Ken Worley, a member of the administration caucus which controls all of the elected offices at the international union level...

...Jointness, according to Don Ephlin, UAW vice president and director of the union's GM department, is when everyone in management and union works together for a common goal—for example, an increase in the company's market share...

...The former general counsel of the UAW, Joseph Rauh, says the practice of arriving at secret decisions within the International Executive Board violates the UAW constitution, which requires that BOB GALE verbatim minutes of IEB meetings be available for members to inspect...

...Bieber would not consent to grant me an interview regarding this and other questions about union democracy within the UAW...

...In his plant, Hammer notes, 150 appointees could steer a local with 3,600 active workers...

...In recent years, managements across the country have attacked such rules as "too costly...

...We felt betrayed," says a member of one of the striking locals...

...When UAW sitdown strikers wrested union recognition from General Motors in 1937, they secured the position of industrial unionism and paved the way for labor victories in many other industries...

...Laarman, the UAW's public-relations chief, concedes that the international has an image problem with the members...

...Marquart, who had supported Walter Reuther during the union's factional stug-gles in the 1940s, wrote that officers of Detroit Local 212, where he was education director, stopped the education committee's biweekly "town hall" discussions of controversial issues because some union members voiced disagreement with UAW policy...

...You don't operate by tearing down the union...

...Instead of reporting out the resolution to block whipsawing, he ruled, during the last session, that delegates would have to vote down the administration's omnibus bargaining resolution to vote on the resolution to block whipsawing...

...A new election was held under supervision of the U.S...

...Some facts, however, were not contested: President Bieber fired Tucker from his staff job after he found out Tucker was running for regional director...

...In a letter to all of its local affiliates explaining its resignation from the AFL-CIO, the UAW's International Executive Board declared that "a Peter Downs, a free-lance writer, is recording secretary of his UA W local in Wentz-ville, Missouri...

...Donny Douglas, president of UAW Local 594 in Pontiac, Michigan, told the Detroit Free Press that Tucker "represents an outcry from the rank and file...

...Laarman professed to be unaware of any complaints about the joint programs...

...Bieber did not comply with the convention's vote...

...The UAW also seemed to be a proud example of union democracy...

...That's a large campaign staff for the person who controls the appointments...

...Long-time UAW activist Victor Reuther, brother of the late Walter Reuther and one of the organizers of the early sit-down strikes, points out that the UAW's Saturn Agreement with General Motors "was negotiated in secret and, in violation of the union constitution, approved by the International Executive Board without a membership vote...

...The UAW is in trouble, and the cause of the trouble is the suppression of membership democracy...

...In Local 735, members have lodged many complaints about the shop committee's failure to administer the grievance procedure...

...Four UAW international officers on the Blue Cross/Blue Shield board of directors never spoke out for the strikers, even when newspapers reported excessive executive perquisites and misuse of funds by Blues executives...

...on occasion, even the almost unanimous mandate of the AFL-CIO convention itself has been thwarted if the constitutional provision or the convention mandate did not meet with the personal pleasure of the president of the AFL-CIO...

...Such attitudes point to what could be the future of the UAW if current trends continue...

...In the long run, the union's hope lies with a membership that freely elects its own leaders and controls UAW policy...

...Peter Laarman, director of the UAW's public-relations department, adds that critics of the union's leadership miss the point that increased foreign competition and an antilabor Administration in Washington have made things more difficult for the union...

...previously, any staff member running for office against an incumbent was automatically fired...

...are untrue and hurt this union in its organizing drives and other activities...

...The executive board of my own Local 2250 refused, on direction from the regional office, to support paperworkers who had been locked out by the International Paper Company...

...Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, formerly an appointed training coordinator in Local 735, says that during union elections, the "clipboarders," as the people in joint programs are called, held campaign meetings on company time and campaigned for their candidates...

...International President Owen Bieber rejects such charges...

...Many other locals have also had to vote again and again to overcome UAW attempts to ignore the members' wishes...

...Criticism of the union leadership," says Laarman, "shatters the members* confidence when they should be more motivated...

...The UAW's history seems to contradict Fraser's explanation...

...Tucker lost by 0.16 votes in the weighted election by delegates to the Region 5 convention...