Does The White House Bailout Leave The UAW Behind?
In today's Detroit Free Press, UAW pres. Ron Gettelfinger says his group was "shut out of discussions" over the White House-based auto industry bailout package announced last week.
Reporting on an interview Gettelfinger gave to Fox Business Network 12/22, the Free Press says Gettelfinger claims he wasn't consulted about the White House plan, which includes at least one provision that the UAW said it couldn't support during the failed bailout negotiations in the Senate 12/12. That provision calls on automakers participating in the bailout to renegotiate labor contracts to cut the autoworker's wages GOPers have called excessive. According to the Detroit paper, the UAW objects to the provision because "The current national labor contract with Detroit’s automakers, which was considered a landmark contract because of its generosity to the automakers, was ratified just last year." A new round of negotiations with automakers is scheduled for 2011.
Should the UAW refuse to participate in new negotiations, the auto bailout deal could once again stall. GM and Chrysler, the largest and smallest of the Big 3 respectively, have said they need billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to stay open. Any change to the labor contracts would need a majority vote from the UAW's membership, and in the Free Press report, Gettelfinger doesn't say what his organization is planning to do with the White House terms. But the union pres., who came to Washington to support a bailout for Detroit, did suggest it might be tough to sell a contract to his members that called on workers to take a large paycut.
From the Free Press: "Gettelfinger said that 'it doesn’t make sense' for the government to keep pushing the union to sacrifice. 'Look, our research department put pen to paper and come up and said, look, if we work for nothing, nothing, that’s not going to fix the problem,' Gettelfinger said. 'Other stakeholders have to step in here. The management, the suppliers, the dealers, the creditors, everybody’s going to have to step up. You can’t wring it all out of the working men and women.'"
Clearly, there's no final answers from the UAW here. But there are some new questions that could send Pres. Bush's supposedly bipartisan bailout spinning off into a partisan ditch. GOPers in the Senate made it clear that they felt the union stalled the bailout in Congress -- and Union-allied Dems claimed it was the GOP's disdain for organized labor that caused them to poison the package before it could come to a Senate vote. By choosing not to invite the UAW to its bailout negotiations, the White House could have left out a key constituency with a strong voice in DC, one that could cause the bailout to become even more of a thorn in the side for Pres.-elect Obama when he takes office. After all, it will be Obama who'll decide if the automakers have restructured in a way that makes them "viable" to compete and thus eligible for gov't assistance. And since the White House bailout plan says revised union contracts are one metric for viability, what the UAW does could bring the whole auto bailout back into the center of politics just a few short months into Obama's tenure.
(EVAN McMORRIS-SANTORO)
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