UAW secretaries strike the union

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

UAW secretaries strike the union



By Jane Slaughter
The Michigan Citizen

Secretaries don't often go on strike. That's one thing that's unusual about the picket line at Jefferson and Chene. The other atypical fact about this labor-management dispute is that one of the parties the clerical workers are striking against is―a union.

Local 512 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) hit the bricks November 27. Their employer is the UAW-DaimlerChrysler National Training Center (NTC), a joint program of the UAW and the company.

The NTC does training for UAW members at DaimlerChrysler in skilled trades and on health and safety, runs an Employee Assistance Program and does childcare referrals, sponsors NASCAR race cars, and promotes productivity and quality increases on the factory floor.

Its company funding is negotiated by the union and determined by a formula based on how many hours UAW members work.

According to an investigative report in the Detroit Free Press last May, the NTC throws parties for politicians and spends lavishly on union-management dinners. An appointed job at the NTC is considered a plum by UAW career officials.

The Free Press reported that the NTC ordered 360 bottles of wine costing $8,670 for receptions during the 2000 Democratic National Convention. The NTC's annual conference is held in Las Vegas―far from any DaimlerChrysler plant--with thousands spent to fly in participants and on comedians and musicians for the dinners.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that 36 percent of the NTC's budget in 1998 went for overhead.

The strikers are 37 clerical, secretarial, and mailroom workers―the support staff for their free-spending superiors. They say that the hard-liners in this dispute are not the DaimlerChrysler managers but the UAW representatives at the top of the NTC structure.

They are bitter that, as they see it, the UAW is not practicing what it preaches about unionism.
The strikers' main issues are wages―they want the same 3% per year that Big Three workers get―and use of personal days.

Their contract gives them seven days per year to use as sick or personal days. But management now wants the ability to punish employees for using these contractual days.

In other words, if the worker was sick, she could take the day off with pay, but her supervisor could still put her in the disciplinary procedure.

Strike captain Jewel Smith says, "Over half our union is single parents, and the majority are going to school too."

Smith says that employees need to be able to use their days off without fear that they will be put on the fast track to being fired for absenteeism.

The strikers cite several other actions by NTC brass that are of the sort the UAW denounces when it is on the union side of the bargaining table instead of the management side:

- Management cut off strikers' health insurance benefits.

- The OPEIU offered to take the disagreement to a mediator, but the NTC refused.

- After the contract expired on November 11, workers stayed on their jobs and the two sides continued to bargain―in good faith, union members believed. But the NTC refused to pay workers for the Thanksgiving holiday, which fell in between the contract expiration and the day the workers struck.

- Earlier this fall, when three maintenance workers who work at the center wanted to join the OPEIU, management refused, forcing the union to go to the National Labor Relations Board to schedule a vote among the three. According to chief steward Anthony Martinez, the main opposition to the maintenance workers' joining the union was from the UAW's associate co-director, Gil Wojcik.

- The workers have already voted the contract offer down once. UAW reps told Local 512 president John Strachan, "Take it back and make them vote on it again." Strachan says, "We are not going to browbeat our members into accepting a contract they don't want."

- Both Smith and Martinez say they had no experience with unions before they started work at the NTC some six years ago. Martinez says he was glad to have a union because "you don't have to worry about someone having a bad day and firing you." But now, he says, "A lot of the UAW forget where they came from in years previous to get to where everyone is at today."

Smith says, "We heard so much about the union, stand up for the union--they taught us this. Our local goes out and supports everything they do. We march in the Labor Day parade. We support them, but now when it's our turn they cross our picket lines." According to the union, UAW managers at the center told the UAW appointees working there to cross the lines or be fired.

Martinez says that the UAW reps give as their reason for stonewalling the OPEIU that "it's UAW members' money." Calls to both UAW and DaimlerChrysler officials at the NTC were not returned.

A call to Nate Gooden, the UAW vice president in charge of the DaimlerChrysler Department, was referred to the UAW's Public Relations Department and not returned.