Contract Mobilization

Point Blank
By Jeff Crosby

Contract Mobilization Begins

Last weekend GE union leaders met from all over the country at the United Auto Workers Union Hall at the GE Aviation plant in Evendale, Ohio, to begin planning for the GE contract negotiations in May and June. Although this article is being written before I get on a plane Friday afternoon, a few things are already clear.

This will not be “normal” negotiations, if there is such a thing. GE has already laid out some stark positions, and has begun organizing to get a yes vote from union members on their proposals. First the company implemented a draconian increase in health care costs on management employees, who have no union to bargain for them. I have never seen such open anger and contempt for any GE program as I have from management regarding the health care plan. A local doctor who told me simply: “The GE plan is the absolute worst I deal with. Pays for the least, and has the most hassles.”

If that were not enough, GE has eliminated the traditional defined benefit pension plan for management new-hires, and it’s logical to assume they’ll try the same with us. As they pointed out last contract, some other companies have done this. It’s also true that companies, like Pratt & Whitney, have negotiated contracts recently that maintained the traditional pension for their employees.

These two issues are critical. The health care plan does nothing to control costs—it simply shifts costs from GE to us.

To think that we would be satisfied by gambling our retirement in the stock market after the utter corruption of the entire economy by the likes of Bear Stearns and AIG during the Great Financial Crisis is ridiculous.

The company may think if they limit the worst of their proposals to future hires it will be acceptable to us. They view things like pensions and decent health care as “legacy” costs, antiquated expenditures that hurt the bottom line. Their view is always to make money NOW and move on. If, for example, shipping parts to a low-cost dictatorship overseas leads to the destruction of American manufacturing, so be it—the point is to make money NOW. If eliminating pensions leads to a pre-Social Security and pre-pensions period like the early 1930s when 60% of all senior citizens lived in poverty—so be it, the point is to make money NOW.

In our view, we are tied to those who went before us, and those who come after us. People whose names I will never know paid dues and walked picket lines and negotiated contracts to provide the benefits that put a roof over the head of my family. The future hires that we are not supposed to worry about are our neighbors, our children, our children’s children. This is a point of view that the company will never understand. The company builds a cadre of leaders who have no ties to any particular community. Capital is mobile at the click of a computer key—labor is tied to our jobs, our families, our communities.

So this set of negotiations will not be “normal”. We have negotiators who know what they are doing. More important, we have members, both new and veterans, who understand their own interests and are committed to defending them. The company will be churning out propaganda about why we should accept costly health care changes and why it is unreasonable to be protected against hunger in your old age. Management employees who have the stomach for it will be taking our temperature, trying to figure out what we will accept. In the next six months, an educated membership needs to take every opportunity to let management know we are not going to accept what management was forced to swallow.

NOTE: President Crosby will be away this week visiting worker-owned cooperative businesses in Spain, as part of a coalition that is looking into starting such projects in Lynn. He will report from Spain to the Local 201 website.