CLASS WAR
UPDATE 1
At striking Ford plant in Michigan, workers revile two-tier wage system
Fri, September 15, 2023
(Updates with new quotes from strikers)
By Eric Cox and Kevin Krolicki
WAYNE, Michigan, Sept 15 (Reuters) -
Striking auto workers converged on a Ford assembly plant on the outskirts of Detroit on Friday morning to show their support for the most ambitious labor action in decades and explain the grievances that led to the three-factory walkout.
The first-ever simultaneous strikes against the "Detroit Three" automakers, including General Motors and Chrysler parent Stellantis, kicked off early on Friday after the union and companies failed to agree on new contracts. Each automaker had one plant shut down.
At Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan, dozens of United Auto Workers (UAW) members were picketing the factory’s main entrance on Friday, and many rued changes to their contract and work rules over the past 15 years that especially cut new "Tier II" hires at lower wages and reduced benefits.
UAW chief Shawn Fain
has described the strike as a societal move to claw back gains take by the financial elite, a message echoed by many strikers.
Eric Mullins, 23, followed his father and grandfather to work at Ford, but the kind of lives they built are out of reach for him as a new hire on a Tier II contract, he said.
After more than three years, at Ford, he has no health care or pension at retirement.
"I can’t even afford the truck I drive,” he said of his Ford 250 pickup. “The rich people in this country want to eliminate the middle class.”
On Thursday, Chief Executive Jim Farley warned of a grim scenario if Ford acquiesced to union demands for a 40% hike in pay, an end to the tiered wage system and a return to defined-benefit pensions.
The UAW proposals would "put us out of business," he said.
But UAW President Fain has said Ford could have funded better pay and benefits for workers if it curtailed stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders. Ford reported returning $2.5 billion to investors in 2022.
Full-time Ford employee Robert Murphy, 53, said he was bothered that some workers get half the pay of others doing similar jobs. And he blamed Ford for not improving efficiency and cutting waste to find money to raise pay.
The plant produces high-profile Ranger and Bronco trucks, but it switched from the more modest Focus. During that transition, hundreds of spare transmissions and other parts were taken out behind the plant to be destroyed, a cost the company could have avoided, Murphy said. Ford did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the transmissions.
“Ninety nine point nine percent of the people here want to be part of a great workplace,” Murphy said.
The strike is ambitious in taking on
three automakers at once
, but strategic in that keeping most factories running preserves workers' strike fund.
Fain has not ruled out more drastic action, such as full company-wide strikes, if a deal cannot be reached.
The plant has been deluged since the strike began at midnight. Shortly after, one supporter of plant workers, a 38-year GM veteran who declined to give his name, said he did not think the industrial action would stop until the automakers gave into the union demands.
"We deserve what we deserve," he said.
(Reporting by Eric Cox and Kevin Krolicki; Writing by Jamie Freed and Peter Henderson; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Nick Zieminski)
Fri, September 15, 2023
(Updates with new quotes from strikers)
By Eric Cox and Kevin Krolicki
WAYNE, Michigan, Sept 15 (Reuters) -
Striking auto workers converged on a Ford assembly plant on the outskirts of Detroit on Friday morning to show their support for the most ambitious labor action in decades and explain the grievances that led to the three-factory walkout.
The first-ever simultaneous strikes against the "Detroit Three" automakers, including General Motors and Chrysler parent Stellantis, kicked off early on Friday after the union and companies failed to agree on new contracts. Each automaker had one plant shut down.
At Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan, dozens of United Auto Workers (UAW) members were picketing the factory’s main entrance on Friday, and many rued changes to their contract and work rules over the past 15 years that especially cut new "Tier II" hires at lower wages and reduced benefits.
UAW chief Shawn Fain
has described the strike as a societal move to claw back gains take by the financial elite, a message echoed by many strikers.
Eric Mullins, 23, followed his father and grandfather to work at Ford, but the kind of lives they built are out of reach for him as a new hire on a Tier II contract, he said.
After more than three years, at Ford, he has no health care or pension at retirement.
"I can’t even afford the truck I drive,” he said of his Ford 250 pickup. “The rich people in this country want to eliminate the middle class.”
On Thursday, Chief Executive Jim Farley warned of a grim scenario if Ford acquiesced to union demands for a 40% hike in pay, an end to the tiered wage system and a return to defined-benefit pensions.
The UAW proposals would "put us out of business," he said.
But UAW President Fain has said Ford could have funded better pay and benefits for workers if it curtailed stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders. Ford reported returning $2.5 billion to investors in 2022.
Full-time Ford employee Robert Murphy, 53, said he was bothered that some workers get half the pay of others doing similar jobs. And he blamed Ford for not improving efficiency and cutting waste to find money to raise pay.
The plant produces high-profile Ranger and Bronco trucks, but it switched from the more modest Focus. During that transition, hundreds of spare transmissions and other parts were taken out behind the plant to be destroyed, a cost the company could have avoided, Murphy said. Ford did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the transmissions.
“Ninety nine point nine percent of the people here want to be part of a great workplace,” Murphy said.
The strike is ambitious in taking on
three automakers at once
, but strategic in that keeping most factories running preserves workers' strike fund.
Fain has not ruled out more drastic action, such as full company-wide strikes, if a deal cannot be reached.
The plant has been deluged since the strike began at midnight. Shortly after, one supporter of plant workers, a 38-year GM veteran who declined to give his name, said he did not think the industrial action would stop until the automakers gave into the union demands.
"We deserve what we deserve," he said.
(Reporting by Eric Cox and Kevin Krolicki; Writing by Jamie Freed and Peter Henderson; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Nick Zieminski)
Khristopher J. Brooks
Fri, September 15, 2023
Ford Motor announced that 600 non-striking workers have been temporarily laid off, hours after workers in a separate part of the factory walked off the job early this morning. Leaders at the United Auto Workers early Friday tapped employees there to kick off a historic strike against the Big Three, drawing national attention to the small town of Wayne, Michigan.
The Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne is one of three locations run by each of Detroit's three automakers selected by the UAW for targeted strikes against the Big Three, after failing to reach a new labor agreement by a Thursday night deadline. Workers at a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, and a Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio, were also commanded by union leaders to leave their posts.
Ford said in a statement that the 600 employees it laid off are tied to the stoppage of work caused by those who did not to come to work on Friday due to the UAW strike.
"This layoff is a consequence of the strike at Michigan Assembly Plant's final assembly and paint departments, because the components built by these 600 employees use materials that must be e-coated for protection," Ford said in a statement Friday. "E-coating is completed in the paint department, which is on strike."
Wayne, Michigan, with a population of roughly 17,000, is a suburb about 45 minutes west of Detroit consisting mainly of blue-collar and middle-class families. The Ford plant there employs about 3,300 workers, most of whom make Bronco SUVs and Ranger midsize pickup trucks. UAW President Shawn Fain visited the Wayne plant Friday and said the union's strike will continue until Ford, GM and Stellantis (which owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram) pay workers a better wage.
UAW union members picket outside the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan, on September 15, 2023. / Credit: MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images
The Wayne plant feels like two separate worlds, said Pete Gruich, 56, who has worked there for 25 years.
The plant is divided into a body shop on one side and an assembly line on the other. The body shop side is a slower-paced environment where the full-body paint process happens, Gruich said. The final assembly side has "a hectic pace and there's no down time," he told CBS MoneyWatch.
"When somebody takes a day off at final (assembly), it takes two people to do that job, sometimes three, because the jobs are so overloaded," he said.
Gruich said there's also division among the employees, between those who make the higher-tier wages and the ones who earn less. That's because managers tell lower-tier employees that they'll move them to the upper tier wages once a top-tier worker has retired, but that rarely happens, Gruich said.
Tensions were high at the plant for weeks leading up to the strike, Gruich said. On Thursday night, employees who are all members of UAW's Local 900 got very little work done and were eager to see how labor negotiations would play out, he said.
Pete Gruich has been an employee at Ford's Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan, for 25 years. He poses for a picture with UAW President Shawn Fain after Local 900 kicked off a strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers on Friday, September 15, 2023. / Credit: Pete Gruich
"We basically just sat the whole night until 10 when Fain decided to strike half of our plant," he said.
Gruich said, soon after Fain chose their union to strike, managers allowed employees to leave their work stations.
"We were held in the cafeteria until midnight (and) then they allowed us to go out," he said. "Nobody was allowed to go back on the floor at that point."
Once outside, the chants began, Gruich said. Younger workers were more energetic and animated while people with more seniority took in the scene in silence, he said.
Fain hasn't said why UAW leadership chose the Wayne plant as one of the first three. Gruich said he thinks it's because workers at the Wayne facility also make parts of seven other plants in the Midwest — plants that produce the Ford Escape, F-250, F-350 and dashboards for the F-150. The parts manufacturing side of Wayne is still operating but the union could ask those workers to walk out as well, Gruich said.
"After like a week or two of Ford not negotiating, they'll end up shutting down the rest of the plant," he said. "And that will in turn shut down six or seven other plants."
No comments:
Post a Comment