BY FRANK FORRESTAL

CHICAGO - Although the final tally has not been reported, officials of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) announced September 30 that union members voted 90 percent in favor of a three-year contract with Ford Motor Co. The previous contract had expired September 14.

The agreement covers 105,000 UAW members employed at Ford's 49 parts and assembly plants in the United States. In the months leading up to the contract expiration date, the union officials did not prepare the UAW membership for a strike and no strike deadline was set. The union tops capitulated completely to the bosses' demands, without even a pretense of putting up a fight.

The new contract institutes for the first time permanent two-tier wages for some UAW parts workers. And, despite claims by the union officialdom that the accord provides job security for the current UAW membership, it allows Ford to lay off workers during a downturn in the economy or if labor productivity goes up.

Chrysler and the UAW also agreed to a tentative contract, based on the Ford-UAW agreement. That ratification vote should be finalized by October 13.

Days before voting on the Ford agreement, workers were given a 28-page booklet, complete with graphics, photos, and charts of "contract highlights" of the 1,200-page accord.

"All I've seen are the highlights," said Rosbene Shields, a UAW worker from the Ford assembly plant in Atlanta, Georgia. "It's the things you don't see that worry me." Shields said the main "selling point of the contract was money."

The settlement includes an up-front $2,000 lump-sum payment, and 3 percent general wage increases in the second and third year.

Many workers at the Ford assembly plant in Chicago said they were against some of the provisions but decided to vote for the contract. Out of the 2,800 workers employed there, 874 voted in favor and 87 against, representing only one-third of the workforce. No gains from `historic breakthrough'
"For nearly twenty years now," the contract summary says, "our country and our union have been in a day-in and day-out fight to keep good jobs in America, not just for the present generation of members but for the young workers of the future as well."

The so-called "historic breakthrough on job security," which claims to guarantee 95 percent of the current 105,000 jobs, means "Ford workers now enjoy job security protections surpassing any previously available to U.S. autoworkers," the summary says.

In reality, the auto bosses are the big winners from this "breakthrough." UAW members are being fed illusions of job guarantees by the labor bureaucracy, which has tried its best to diffuse any rank-and-file resistance to the demands of the auto barons. As in previous agreements, there are loopholes in the contract that allow Ford to eliminate jobs and lay off thousands of workers. These are not mentioned in the contract summary. Workers are just learning about them.

"The guarantee of keeping 95 percent of workers is kind of a big thing to swallow," one brake-line worker told Salm Kolis, who works at the Ford plant in Atlanta. "It's just some words to make people happy."

The contract contains language saying that Ford does not guarantee jobs if there is a downturn in the economy.

The accord also has a 400-page appendix that includes a "productivity escape clause." According to the Wall Street Journal, this clause allows the Big Three "to avoid job guarantees in some situations, including when worker cutbacks stem from productivity gains," and lets the auto bosses "eliminate jobs if their manufacturing operations become more efficient and as a result they need fewer workers to make vehicles." In addition, the job guarantee applies only to "competitive operations." According to the Journal, General Motors considers 14 of its parts plants to be "troubled" or "uncompetitive." Model for bosses, not workers
The escape clauses, in effect, mean the auto bosses have free reign to continue cutting the workforce, something they have been doing for more than 15 years. The UAW has 443,000 members now, down from 702,000 in 1979.

The big-business press has smiled on the contract. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, headlined "Some Companies Try to Rebuild Loyalty," points out that "leaders of blue- collar unions are calling the Ford-UAW deal a model." The article ends with a quote from William Johnson, president of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) district in Seattle, saying, "Everyone is going to go into negotiations and say....`We'd like the language that Ford has.' "

The union tops' claims notwithstanding, the Ford-UAW agreement is a model for the bosses, not the workers.

All of the Big Three plants have been outsourcing jobs for years. Nearly all of the seat departments have been shut down, for instance, with companies going to outside suppliers.

Last year Ford outsourced the seat department at the assembly plant here, cutting 150 jobs. The seats are now built at Lear Seating, in nearby Indiana. The plant opened last year. Although the workers there are members of the UAW, their starting wage is approximately half the pay at Big Three plants.

In the past few years workers have also experienced job combinations and a qualitative increase in line speeds. Two-tier wage divides workers
The agreement contains provisions allowing a permanent two- tier wage structure for auto parts workers. For more than a decade the Big Three companies have been on a deunionization drive against parts workers. Between 1985 and 1995, employment at independent parts suppliers grew by 100,000. Most of these new jobs are done by workers who get lower pay and are without a union.

Today, only 20 percent of the 450,000 workers in the independent auto parts industry are unionized. According to one union report, "the overall picture is of deunionization on a massive scale." More and more, the UAW is becoming a union of auto workers in the Big Three plants, not of workers throughout the auto industry.

Ford was not successful in extending the two-tier new hire provisions from three to six years. But the previous set-up of hiring new employees at 70 percent of the base rate, reaching the top rate in six increments of 5 percent over three years, was maintained. The contract also encourages "insourcing" of parts jobs, allowing Ford to set up new parts operations organized by the UAW but not bound to the same wage scale.

The two-tier is especially unpopular with the thousands of new hires who have joined the union in recent years, particularly at Ford and Chrysler, which have done most of the hiring. "I feel like a second-class member of the union," a young worker, recently hired at the Ford plant in Atlanta, told UAW member Kolis. Another worker from the body shop of that plant said, "I don't like the contract. I don't like the two- tier wages. If you are doing the work you should get the same pay."

In Detroit, some workers at one of the ratification meetings said they saw the two-tier wage for new parts workers as the worst point in the agreement. One new hire who is still on probation told UAW member John Sarge, "We could have done better because you never take the company's first offer."

"We could have done better," said Tony Jackson, a UAW assembly line worker at Ford in Atlanta. "This contract takes from people coming in. The union is weaker with this contract." GM workers in Canada sidetrack deal
Meanwhile, the perspective of UAW officials in the United States to capitulate to General Motors in a similar way they did with Ford and Chrysler was sidetracked by the strike of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) against GM.

An article in the business section of the New York Times reported, "Leaders of the United Automobile Workers had been close to reaching their own deal with G.M. this week, and were disappointed by the Canadian strike. Stephen P. Yokich, the U.A.W. president, said at a news conference today [October 3] in Detroit that while the union supported the strike, `we were hoping that out brothers and sisters in Canada could settle.' "

Many auto workers are now following closely the CAW strike in Canada. "They're doing it right up there. They had a strike deadline," said Jimmy, a production worker at the Chicago Ford plant. "At least somebody is doing something. We haven't had a strike here in 20 years."

Frank Forrestal is a member of UAW Local 551 at Ford Motor Co. in Chicago.  
 
 
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