Ford Kansas City Plant Rejects Contract Modifications
And it wasn’t even close. Though the proposed concessions didn’t even move Ford to parity with its UAW-VEBA-owned cross-town rivals, 92 percent of the KC plant’s workers rejected the deal. According to The Detroit News, a UAW national Vice President tried to convince workers to accept the deal prior to the vote, but was apparently shouted down by angry employees. “(He) spoke and was booed,” said one worker who the DetN did not identify. “There were a lot of ‘No’s!’ It was a very loud meeting.” And apparently, it was the no-strike clause that got workers so steamed. Which makes a certain amount of sense… after all, what good is a union that can’t strike? The problem is that the no-strike clause was a crucial factor in convincing Fiat to take charge of Chrysler, an automaker the UAW ended up with a 60 percent stake in. And now, the worker’s rejection of a Ford agreement strikes an equally rippling blow to the UAW’s pattern-bargaining strategy. Can the UAW have it both ways? It sure looks like it’s going to try. Though KC was the first local rejection of the deal (five other plants narrowly approved it, two have rejected), a vote is approaching (on Friday) at the Dearborn Truck plant that has been a hotbed of UAW dissent. So much so, that it appears that UAW leadership may have delayed the Dearborn vote until after all the other locals’ votes. Still, if the Dearborn vote fails, which it well could, we could see major turmoil within the ranks of the UAW.
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The east coast city that will be getting the new Boeing 787 second assembly line and 737 follow-on plane assembly when the IAM union brain trust craters is Charleston, South Carolina, not Charlotte as I mentioned above. This morning’s paper says the union is asking for a full-blown 10-year contract instead of just adding a 10-year no-strike to the current contracts. When today’s government spending finally hits, there is going to be an apocalyptic shift in life as we know it in the United States. No thinking company on the face of the earth would sign any kind of a labor agreement with built-in raises extending more than 3-4 years from now.
If Ford wants the same concessions from their workers as GM and Chrysler workers got, then they should file for C11. Seems to me, Ford is getting a bit greedy. *If* Ford was doing as they believe they are, then they should pay their employees as such. Ford employees should not have to take the same concessions as employees from a bankrupt company.
Ford won't be able to compete on a level playing field without the union allowing them to get cost of labor down to the same as GM.