With these words, UAW President Bob King may have slipped up and told the truth on Wednesday as he spoke to an annual automotive research seminar in Northern Michigan.
The key words in King’s quote are actually in the preface, which was curiously omitted from most printed accounts. “We now know” implies that the UAW used to think job security came from somewhere else.
If the UAW had focused on providing the best services at the best value years ago, instead of demanding as much as they thought they could squeeze out of employers, maybe they could have helped prevent 215,000 manufacturing jobs from leaving the state between 2000 and 2005.
The UAW isn’t to blame for every job lost, but in many cases, union negotiators’ misguided sense of self-interest helped drive companies into the ground or out of the country. In 2003, during a round of negotiations with Delphi Corp., one local UAW leader was quoted saying, “Some of my members will be against anything that gives lesser wages for equal work.” And so instead of cutting pay, Delphi lowered the starting wages for new workers and closed a parts plant and an assembly plant. Two years later, the company had to file for bankruptcy.
When Delphi finally did declare bankruptcy, they still faced two more years of contentious negotiations with the UAW. It wasn’t until after a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, two years of fighting, union threats of a “long strike,” and the closure of 21 plants in the U.S. that the union finally accepted an across-the-board pay cut.
Time and again, the UAW has clung to unsustainable wage and benefit demands without much regard for the health of the companies their members worked for. Ultimately, it meant that many union members lost their jobs.
King continued his remarks by promising that “more adversarial models of unionism” would eclipse the UAW’s new, relatively business-friendly negotiating strategy if they couldn’t get their desired contracts from employers. So the UAW hasn’t lost its swagger. But as companies send jobs out of state or overseas rather than deal with intransigent union leaders, whom does King really think the UAW is hurting?
