ADDICTED to Overtime

...It said, "We don't want our own people jamming the company line down our throats...

...the Administration Caucus has ruled the national union since the 1940s...

...Workers in one section, the cold mill, shut their unit down several times...

...From Seattle to St...

...The New Directions platform called for "democracy, solidarity, and accountability...

...This plan usually has one crew working Friday-Saturday on days and Sunday-Monday on nights, all at regular-time pay...

...Jane Slaughter is the director of Labor Notes...

...His mother was a factory worker who reared four children alone...

...We must break this addiction of overtime...

...I'll never forget this sergeant-at-arms challenging me for taking literature from people," Yettaw says...

...Rather, it was early instances of injustice that led him to cast his lot against the corporations and with the union opposition...

...The outcomes were partial victories until Local 599's walkout...

...I found that kind of ironic...

...The forced overtime meant sixteen-hour days and fifty-six-hour weeks...

...Members fought back...

...It opposes the joint management-labor teams that have become prevalent throughout GM and the rest of corporate America...

...Her most recent contribution to The Progressive was an interview with Staughton Lynd, in the February 1994 issue...

...In the 1989 convention-delegate elections, the New Directions slate "got our ass kicked," says Yettaw...

...We lived a lifestyle our forefathers never anticipated...

...I was number one on our slate, but I missed even going as an alternate by hundreds of votes...

...One of Yettaw's most controversial stands is against overtime, which corporations around the country are using to avoid hiring additional workers, since it is cheaper to pay overtime than to pay health and other benefits to new hires...

...Families joined workers to send a message that this schedule was a family-wrecker...

...Forced overtime was ended...

...As corporations look for ways to get more work out of fewer workers, they are turning both to overtime and to harsh work schedules...

...Under the name Cold Mill Committee for a Decent Schedule, they held a public protest at the company office...

...And I told them, 'I'm sorry, fellas, there's right and there's wrong...

...Because it dared to shut down GM, and because it won, Local 599's fight was seen everywhere as "a beachhead in the fight to shorten work time," says Yettaw...

...We lived off our past reputation so much from the 1950s and 1960s that we never passed the ideal along," he says...

...My history of this union, when I went to college, it was socialists and left-leaning people and communists that actually formed this union...

...Later, they voted into office a new bargaining chair, Richard Aguilar, who had led the fight against the ten-hour day...

...Some employees worked 2,000 hours in the new regimen's first eight months—nearly sixty hours a week...

...There is no premium pay for weekends, or for the last four hours of the day...

...When all members in the giant Packard complex were allowed to vote, however, rather than just those in the affected plants, they lost the vote, and the schedule remains in place...

...In the UAW, to break with the Administration Caucus is to open oneself up to unrelenting censure from officers and staffers, who treat disagreement as betrayal...

...Battenberg III, president of GM's parts-making subsidiary, explains that 'round-the-clock schedules seven days a week are proving efficient...

...At a Machinists Union meeting at Boeing, one member called the strikes a big step for the UAW—"Let's do the same...

...When 11,500 members of UAW Local 599 walked out over speed-up and excessive overtime last September, they forced GM to hire 779 new workers—despite GM's vow to add "no new Social Security numbers" to the employment rolls it had slashed so deeply since 1979...

...They won a lawsuit demanding the right to vote on the new program (officers had not permitted one...

...The chairman of the shop committee has called Yettaw a "Nazi dictator" in the union newspaper...

...I'm glad to see it coming...

...They wore T-shirts with the message Plant io, The Plant From Hell, and dubbed the new program the "Cooperative Representation Alternatives Policy," or CRAP...

...The New Deal has been dismantled tremendously over the last several decades, and Newt Gingrich plans on dismantling whatever's left...

...Soon thereafter, however, he and the rest of the elected officers had a political falling out that continues to this day...

...His fellow officers told him not to go, not to risk offending the International...

...As the corporations started pushing jointness, the union started having people think in terms of company ideas, in terms of competition and profit," Yettaw says...

...Aside from taking on single issues like jointness and overtime, Yettaw believes the union movement must come together and flex its muscles...

...A lot of my friends were going to Vietnam...

...We're all dealing with the broken promises that the corporations have made and with this race for competitiveness," Yettaw says...

...So I met with Tucker and Victor Reuther, me and some of my most trusted people, who were not officers, and we made a decision that we're going to resign from the Caucus and we're going to form a New Directions group at our site...

...Last summer, Aguilar led them on a short strike, and the ten-hour day came off the table...

...Soon after his return from Vietnam, he accepted a promotion to a nonunion, salaried clerk's job at GM, while attending college on the GI Bill...

...But he also draws hope from insurgents in other unions...

...Robinson, was kind of crude...

...With time out for a tour in Vietnam, the forty-eight-year-old Yettaw has been a GM worker since four days out of high school...

...Management never even informed me...

...When management planned a layoff, they failed to warn the clerks...

...I was the president of the local, and no one else holding office would come with me...

...At the UAW's 1986 national convention, an insurgent group called New Directions aimed to take over the union's St...

...Eventually, the Labor Department ordered a new election in Region 5, and Tucker invited Yettaw to attend...

...At three of its Packard Electric plants in Ohio, GM has imposed a twelve-hour day, three days on, three days off...

...Yettaw then went to work on the shop floor, and after putting in only four years, he was encouraged by older workers to run for committeeman (a full-time representative for 250 workers...

...They were scared...

...That gave me a pretty good idea management cares about nothing but their goals, and you're merely a Social Security number...

...I'll never forget him saying, "These people are socialists and communists, and you shouldn't take this stuff from them.' "Now I'm being told this by someone who's supposed to be representing this union...

...The UAW's Public Review Board has spoken of the union as a "one-party institution not 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...

...At meetings of the union's GM Council, Yettaw has often been a lone dissenting voice and the subject of scalding attacks from the chair...

...Yettaw says he draws inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Lech Walesa...

...They were accustomed to five-day weeks and eight-hour days, until management added weekend shifts last October...

...After six years as a committeeman, Yettaw and a group of other young turks decided to challenge the Administration Caucus in the local...

...Management wanted the same three crews of workers who had worked a total of fifteen shifts per week to now work eighteen shifts...

...But some local unions and some rank-and-filers are saying "enough...

...Writing in the union newspaper after the strike, he said, "It is wrong for some members to have two paychecks and one job when others have one check, are laid off, or their children in their adult years are still living at home with them at an age at which we had a full-time job in a General Motors factory...

...As co-chair of the New Directions movement, the reform caucus within the UAW, he has been a thorn in the side of higher-ups in the international union...

...In 1994, with auto-industry profits booming and the union's numbers shrinking, the UAW International began to support local-unions' strikes against contracting out and speed-up...

...He points out that many of his members work the equivalent of six weeks a month because of overtime...

...Most local UAW officers, who spend no time on the assembly line themselves, were happy to oblige...

...But the members voted the plan down two-to-one...

...On this schedule, says a union member, "If you don't buy the newspaper, you don't know what day it is...

...NUMMI...

...The leader of the Flint strike was Dave Yettaw, president of Local 599, the largest in GM...

...Even though immediate management knew of my intent to buy a home, knew I was signing papers, they never cautioned me...

...If there is one factory famous for being lean and mean, it is the GM-Toyota joint venture assembly plant in California, New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc...

...Louis-based Region 5. A staffer named Jerry Tucker had declared his candidacy, and was promptly fired...

...You'll see a new social contract demanded in this country...

...The New Directions group in Local 599 calls itself the "Reuther Caucus," after UAW founders Walter and Victor Reuther...

...We as organized labor are trying to draw a finish line...

...Me and a buddy of mine decided we would go in the military...

...He is a member of Labor Party Advocates, the group that plans to found a new party in 1996, and will speak at the cross-union Labor Notes Conference in April...

...are selected wholly by that party...

...ADDICTED to Overtime In Flint, Michigan, a UAW leader just says no BY JANE SLAUGHTER Fifty-eight years after the great Flint sit-down strikes that forced General Motors to recognize the United Auto Workers, the name Flint is once again serving as a symbol of resistance for union workers...

...But what really offended me and attracted me to New Directions was this other sergeant-at-arms saying, 'Don't you know that communist Jerry Tucker is married to a nigger?' Right away I was sympathetic to Tucker, because I felt, maybe naively so, that we'd stepped out of that era as a country...

...The following year, though, when the officer elections came due, Yettaw went into the plants with a bullhorn and a soapbox...

...The company may try to force competition between us, but that's not a proper role for our elected representatives...

...When the union won the 531 production jobs it demanded, they were the first production workers hired at the site since 1986...

...Management came to the table, and the union ended up with an average thirty-six-hour week, at forty hours pay...

...You work hard and do what the boss says, you depend on yourself...

...They filed a grievance, which officers of their union, the International Union of Electronics Workers Local 717, ignored...

...Afhat really offended me and attracted me to New Directions was this other sergeant-at-arms saying, 'Don't you know that communist Jerry Tucker is married to a nigger?' A high-school guidance counselor may have inadvertently given Yettaw a push to succeed...

...they didn't believe in themselves, I don't think...

...I believe Tucker's doing the right thing,' " Yettaw recalls...

...There a meeting of reform leaders from a range of blue-collar and white-collar unions will meet for the first time, to compare their progress—and, no doubt, to savor the renown of Flint...

...But three years later, his slate took about a third of the slots...

...Yettaw wasn't raised with the union in his blood...

...When I was young I wanted to be an attorney, but my counselor, Mr...

...But, he says, "she was a farm girl, never a union person...

...He told me, 'You can never be a lawyer because you don't have the economic background.' " While working in the bumper pit in GM's assembly plant in the fall of 1965, Yettaw volunteered for the service...

...The way Yettaw sees it, though, it is he who has stuck with the values of the UAW pioneers, while the union at the top has abandoned them...

...His opponents soon gave up trying to heckle...

...Political machines in UAW locals tend to be sophisticated and long-lived...

...Yettaw's group lost and, for some years, he made peace with the Caucus, rising to the presidency in 1987...

...He was the only New Directions candidate elected that year...

...We thought we were going to be great soldiers for the government, for the freedom of America, but we found out we were defending the interests of oil and rubber, testing the new military hardware after World War II...

...I was getting ready to buy a home," Yettaw remembers...

...My opposition thought I was dead politically...

...In 1993, management demanded a ten-hour day/four-day week...

...There, GM initially offered to add fifty new jobs...

...Crowds came at break-time to hear him speak, preaching against jointness...

...Many workers welcome overtime, since their wages have not risen in real terms since 1973...

...Taking the long view, Yettaw is optimistic...

...I thought it was never going to happen...

...Workers at National Steel's Granite City, Illinois, mill were more successful...

...As one put it, "I like working at GM, but I don't want to live there...

...From there we're going to hit bottom and we're going to bounce back as working people...

...Tucker's supporters, who believed the Administration Caucus had stolen the election by rigging delegate races, were appealing for support from the delegates from other regions...

...If we're going to continue this," Yettaw says, "all of organized labor across this country is going to have to join in solidarity and demonstrate like they do in Europe, with a one-day general strike...

...Paul, frustrated members of other unions now evoke the Flint strikes (a second local went out in January 1995) as their proof that it is possible to stand up to management, even after a decade and a half of union defeats and surrenders without a fight...

...Overtime is the cocaine of the American auto worker," he says...