Could Trump expose another UAW disconnect?

[kscarbel2]

John Irwin, Automotive News  /  July 27, 2016

UAW President Dennis Williams faces another potential headache less than a year after a contentious contract ratification process with the Detroit 3: Donald Trump.

Blue-collar support for Trump, who won the Republican presidential nomination in part by appealing to workers like those represented by the UAW, could threaten to expose another potential rift between union leadership and some rank-and-file members.

One rift was exposed last year when Fiat Chrysler workers soundly rejected an initial deal cut between union leadership and the automaker, when General Motors skilled-trades workers rejected and delayed ratification of a new contract and when leadership narrowly escaped another embarrassing rejection at the hands of Ford workers.

Although the UAW was able to secure significant gains with the Detroit 3 -- including an agreement to end the dreaded two-tier wage system -- the contentious ratification process exposed a significant gap between the priorities of union leadership and a large share of workers.

Now, Trump could expose another gap, and Williams says he and union leaders are doing everything in their power to keep that from happening.

Recent polls show blue-collar workers, especially white workers, supporting Trump by large margins. That could give Trump an advantage in the UAW’s home in the Rust Belt, where blue-collar voters typically lean Democratic but can be persuaded to vote Republican if a message resonates. (See: Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.)

Trump has tapped into blue-collar workers’ often legitimate fears about globalization and free-trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Many voters, especially those without college degrees and those who work in manufacturing, feel as though Washington has left them behind over the last few decades as jobs moved out of the country and wages stagnated.

Trump, who, to be sure, has also built his campaign on inflammatory rhetoric, racial resentment and xenophobia, has largely avoided specifics about how he would craft better trade deals. And, as Williams has pointed out, Trump has said things that could be unflattering to the average worker, suggesting that wages are too high and saying automakers should move production toward lower-wage states.

But that doesn’t seem to matter to many blue-collar voters. When presented with an option between Trump and Hillary Clinton -- an establishment politician who previously supported TPP before backtracking and whose husband signed NAFTA into law -- many of these workers are siding with the former reality TV star.

Williams, speaking with reporters Tuesday on a conference call from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, said the UAW would do everything it could to ensure Clinton becomes president and gets the support of as many union members as possible.

Williams said Clinton “made every indication” during a sit-down with her that she would renegotiate NAFTA as president, which Williams said would help win over UAW members reluctant to support her.

Williams also said the union has begun “engaging” workers on the election and has promised to knock on doors in each of the states the UAW is located.

“We believe that … the more we educate our members, the more they will support Hillary Clinton,” he said.

That engagement appears to be showing signs of working, if what Williams said is any indication. Williams said he estimates between 18 and 19 percent of UAW members support Trump today, down from the 28 percent of workers an internal poll found several months ago.

If those numbers are accurate, it is an encouraging sign that the UAW leadership is more effectively communicating with its members than it was last year, when Williams admitted the union was caught off guard by anti-ratification workers on social media.

But as last year showed, UAW leadership cannot afford to get complacent on messaging. Otherwise, if Trump rides on the support of enough blue-collar workers into office, that gap between leadership and some members could shut the union out of the White House for four or eight years.

 

[m16ty]

In the last few years the rank and file union members are getting screwed while the union leaders live high on the hog. For a long time the members fell for the crap the leaders are spewing but they are starting to wise up.

We had a large local company go on strike a couple of years ago. The leaders talked them in to striking, they were on strike for 2 months, and finally went back to work for less money than they were offered before the strike. They lost 2 months of work and a raise, while the leaders never missed a paycheck.

A lot of the rank and file still praised the leaders for their hard work but quite a few finally saw the light. All the union fat cats care about is to keep you sending in the dues. 

[kscarbel2]

Who is the UAW to advise its members on who they should vote for?

[grayhair]

14 hours ago, kscarbel2 said:

quoted from above article:  "Trump, who, to be sure, has also built his campaign on inflammatory rhetoric, racial resentment and xenophobia, has largely avoided specifics about how he would craft better trade deals. And, as Williams has pointed out, Trump has said things that could be unflattering to the average worker, suggesting that wages are too high and saying automakers should move production toward lower-wage states."

Left-wing asshole and complicit reporter just can't help themselves, had to insert the standard liberal talking points.  I have followed Trump pretty closely and didn't hear any of this "inflammatory rhetoric, racial resentment and xenophobia."  If you are an ISIS recruit then maybe you are inflamed.  Otherwise, I call bs on this numb nuts "reporter and on Williams."  If he was a real reporter he would have challenged Williams on this bs rather than printing it.  My humble opinion.

Edited July 29, 2016 by grayhair

[m16ty]

Back during the heat of the last election we were doing some work in a TVA (big union) coal plant that was being closed directly because of the actions of the Obama administration. I talked to several that weren't at all happy about loosing their jobs and blamed Obama but you'd still be surprised at how many "union for Obama" bumper stickers you saw in the parking lot. That was then and this is now, I'm thinking when the layoff slips started getting passed out reality started setting in and they are changing their tune.

We had a local Ford glass plant that sold out. A friend of mine went from making close to $30 a hr to $10. All the union would offer is to just be glad you still have a job (but keep sending in those dues). My friend walked. The worst part about it was before all this went down the company was offering $20K+ buyouts to people that would just quit but the union was telling everybody to just hold on and things would work out. Not only did he get the huge cut in pay, he walked with nothing because he didn't take the buyout when he had the chance. 

I have several friends that were once big union supporters and would vote a straight democrat ticket just like the union told them to. Every one I've talked to is voting Trump the time around and a couple are campaigning for him.  

[kscarbel2]

1 hour ago, m16ty said:

Back during the heat of the last election we were doing some work in a TVA (big union) coal plant that was being closed directly because of the actions of the Obama administration. I talked to several that weren't at all happy about loosing their jobs and blamed Obama but you'd still be surprised at how many "union for Obama" bumper stickers you saw in the parking lot. That was then and this is now, I'm thinking when the layoff slips started getting passed out reality started setting in and they are changing their tune.

We had a local Ford glass plant that sold out. A friend of mine went from making close to $30 a hr to $10. All the union would offer is to just be glad you still have a job (but keep sending in those dues). My friend walked. The worst part about it was before all this went down the company was offering $20K+ buyouts to people that would just quit but the union was telling everybody to just hold on and things would work out. Not only did he get the huge cut in pay, he walked with nothing because he didn't take the buyout when he had the chance. 

I have several friends that were once big union supporters and would vote a straight democrat ticket just like the union told them to. Every one I've talked to is voting Trump the time around and a couple are campaigning for him.  

After 5 owners in 12 years, a former Ford glass plant finally has a stable owner

Automotive News  /  August 1, 2011

Welcome to a huge and until now unwanted factory in the North American auto industry. It is the new home of Carlex Glass in Nashville.

How unwanted was it?

Try five owners in 12 years. Which is remarkable considering that for decades, without interruption, the plant has been supplying windshields and windows for some very popular U.S. light vehicles, among them the Ford F-150 pickup and Escape SUV.

But today it's different. Now that the storm of the recession is over, now that less committed players have vacated the field, Carlex Glass America, the U.S. operating unit of Japan's Central Glass Co., is moving in.

Carlex is one of many established suppliers that aim to turn the wreckage of the recession into opportunity by investing in new technology for the long term.

The Japanese giant couldn't have picked a less likely spot.

The dowdy, half-century-old plant sits on a hill overlooking downtown Nashville. Three brick smokestacks tower overhead, two of which were taken out of operation years ago. Inside, long lines of huge, gothic black machinery resemble locomotives abandoned in a dim train station.

The lights are out over what seem like acres of wooden shelves holding thousands of sheets of dusty glass.

The roof leaks.

New methods, complex shapes

But Carlex thinks this is the starting point for a play to expand its North American market share of windshields and side windows for cars and trucks.

Carlex peered into the neglected behemoth and saw a dusty jewel. It has begun investing $100 million to clean up the plant, modernize its equipment, demolish traces of its obsolete past, boost its capacity and use it to solicit more North American business -- ideally from the Detroit 3.

The company is betting on new technology, including a modern process called press-form. Unlike gravity-sag windshield shaping, the new process will permit greater manipulation of glass and provide the ability to handle more creative vehicle designs. The investment also will allow the plant to make thinner glass, according to customer desires. Thinner glass means less weight, which improves fuel economy.

The state of Tennessee is kicking in more money to help Carlex retrain and update the plant's 450 employees -- a fraction of the 3,500 workers who once produced windshields and windows for Ford Motor Co. there.

"Things are absolutely going to change here," declares Jim Shepherd, Carlex's executive vice president, who with his wife is moving to suburban Nashville from Detroit.

Sitting in his barren industrial office at the plant, with little more than a gray metal desk and a couple of metal-frame guest chairs from the era of black-and-white TV, Shepherd motions around the room. "We're going to knock down these walls. We're going to get away from this 1950s atmosphere."

Carlex will make the plant its North American headquarters, moving personnel there from the Detroit area, along with the suburban Detroit work force of Carlite, its newly acquired aftermarket auto-glass company.

"This place has been neglected, and we're going to fix that," Shepherd says. "The employees here might be a little jaded and uncertain about us, having been through so many owners who wanted to get rid of the business. But they will soon see we're serious.

"The biggest difference for us is that we're in the glass business. The others who came before weren't. They had their hands full with bigger concerns. Our only concern is making glass and windshields, and we believe this is the place to do it."

That, more or less, is the status of the 54-year-old glass plant.

But how the factory ended up at this juncture is a story that mirrors almost every trend that has come and gone in U.S. auto manufacturing for the past quarter century.

The industry's evolution from Eisenhower-era Big 3 hegemony to the Japanese invasion of the 1980s, the U.S.-Japanese joint-venture supplier bubble, the automaker divestitures of parts operations, the rise of megasuppliers in the late 1990s, the private-capital supplier wave -- it's all there in the run-up to Carlex's acquisition of the plant in April.

It all came and went.

The operation, originally created as the Ford Glass Plant, already was three decades old when Gary Casteel moved from Muscle Shoals, Ala., to work there as a young pipe fitter in 1988. As the in-house producer of much of Ford's North American windshields and windows, it was one of the biggest auto glass plants in the industry, with 1.8 million square feet under roof.

In the 1950s and 1960s, three enormous float lines heated the sand to 3,000 degrees in ovens that burn so bright they can only be viewed through hand-held black glass panels.

One of the Nashville plant's most notable features is that, unlike most glass factories, it houses the entire process. Workers bring raw sand in through one door, melt it and cook it into flawless glass. They then shape the glass, finish it, package it and ship complete windshields out the other door to vehicle assembly lines.

"I really don't know of any other plant in America that does it all," Casteel says.

Casteel was elected to the plant's UAW Local 737 bargaining committee in 1990. By that time the industry was under unfamiliar new pressures. Detroit was struggling through its second recession in a decade, and domestic market share was slipping away to import brands. Ford was eager to find new cost reductions and operating efficiencies, even if it meant divesting itself of some of its large in-house parts operations -- an issue the UAW resisted.

Today Casteel is director of the UAW's Region 8, a vast union territory stretching from Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina up through Tennessee and Virginia and into Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. "That plant always ran well," Casteel says. "We always had good labor relations."

Japanese partner

But Ford's component management team informed the union in 1990 that the glass operation needed to reach beyond Ford business. A new corner of the industry was rapidly emerging in the form of Japanese automakers assembling vehicles in U.S. plants. Nissan Motor Co. was expanding car and truck production just a few miles away in Smyrna, Tenn. Honda Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and others were opening assembly plants around the lower Midwest and Southeast.

But to gain glass business from such Asian transplants, Ford would need to form a separate joint-venture supply company in a deal with its large Japanese competitor, Central Glass.

"They told us: "We don't want to do anything to hurt the glass plant here,'" Casteel recalls. "But they said we really need to do this deal with Central to get more business."

The Ford-Central hookup was named Carlex, and the venture opened a separate state-of-the-art window fabricating plant in Vonore, Tenn., on the state's eastern edge.

Unwanted orphan

By the end of the 1990s, the industry was evolving again. This time, megasupplier mania was in the air. Individual component suppliers were merging and being acquired to roll up into multipart module and system supplier groups. The larger ones hoped to provide a sort of one-stop shopping for automakers, responsible for entire vehicle systems, including anything from a car's rolling chassis to its brakes and tailpipe and steering parts.

Amid great hoopla, General Motors spun off its vast global parts operations into an independent publicly traded entity, Delphi Corp. Ford similarly spun off its huge parts operations, including the Nashville glass plant, into a public megagroup dubbed Visteon Corp. [huge mistake]

Delphi went public in 1999 and Visteon in 2000 with visions of a bright future. But the ventures soon collapsed. In 2005, Delphi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Visteon followed in 2009.

By way of restructuring, Visteon identified 23 unwanted properties and business segments to unload -- among them, the Nashville glass plant. That decision in 2005 pushed the windshield factory off to new ownership by Automotive Components Holdings LLC, a safeguarding umbrella that sought yet another new owner.

A former Automotive Components Holdings manager, who asked not to be named, said the group's sole function was to "hold" and operate the glass plant with the other unwanted plants until viable buyers could be found.

Casteel also lent his time to finding a buyer for the plant.

"We approached everybody," he says.

"Nobody wanted it. The problem we encountered was that the only people who considered it were just after its book of Ford business. They thought they could move the business into their own plants and then close Nashville. We weren't going to let that happen."

Private equity buyer

The buyer who finally emerged in April 2007 was hardly a familiar auto industry name.

Robert Price, a wealthy investor from Tulsa, Okla., had made his fortune in commercial real estate and oil and gas investments. According to press reports at the time, Price was at least partly motivated by his desire to save the jobs at Ford's other glass factory in Tulsa. The older Nashville plant, along with a third glass operation in Juarez, Mexico, simply came with the package.

Price entrusted the operations to a newly formed entity first called simply Glass Products, and in 2008 renamed Zeledyne LLC. Zeledyne management drew from Ford's ranks of component executives, and the group took possession of the plants in 2008.

The deal wasn't unique; Price was part of a trend sweeping the supplier industry. Private investment companies were acquiring distressed parts makers at bargain prices, running them with independent management teams and hoping to use private capital to improve their profit picture.

Efforts to speak with Price or other members of the venture were unsuccessful.

But Price's timing couldn't have been worse. By mid-2008, the U.S. economy was teetering. By the third quarter, a banking crisis had locked up the capital markets, threatening business plans in all industries. By 2009, Zeledyne was frozen in place, along with most of the rest of the auto industry. Although the new team invested in Nashville enough to keep it operating, by 2010, the plant was again for sale.

Fresh investment at last

Carlex's Shepherd declines to say how much Central paid for the Nashville plant this year, noting that its acquisition did not include the Tulsa or Juarez factories. It did include Zeledyne's aftermarket glass business, Carlite.

Casteel believes the Japanese owner is in a good position to take the plant into new business deals. After 50 years of operation and more than 20 years of soliciting outside business, the plant no longer is owned by Ford.

It no longer is owned by a supplier in financial trouble. It no longer is owned by a private investor with an unproven track record. It no longer is being starved for capital improvements. It no longer is in jeopardy of being closed.

"We think we can help them get into GM and Chrysler now," Casteel says.

"These guys are serious global players. And they need this source of glass. I'm pretty excited about the future there. We've all been through a lot with that plant."

 

[TeamsterGrrrl]

I know some UAW retirees from the closed Twin Cities Assembly Plant that built the Ranger, they're supporting Hillary. One of them was a delegate at the convention in Philly.

[m16ty]

6 hours ago, kscarbel2 said:

After 5 owners in 12 years, a former Ford glass plant finally has a stable owner

Automotive News  /  August 1, 2011

Welcome to a huge and until now unwanted factory in the North American auto industry. It is the new home of Carlex Glass in Nashville.

How unwanted was it?

Try five owners in 12 years. Which is remarkable considering that for decades, without interruption, the plant has been supplying windshields and windows for some very popular U.S. light vehicles, among them the Ford F-150 pickup and Escape SUV.

But today it's different. Now that the storm of the recession is over, now that less committed players have vacated the field, Carlex Glass America, the U.S. operating unit of Japan's Central Glass Co., is moving in.

Carlex is one of many established suppliers that aim to turn the wreckage of the recession into opportunity by investing in new technology for the long term.

The Japanese giant couldn't have picked a less likely spot.

The dowdy, half-century-old plant sits on a hill overlooking downtown Nashville. Three brick smokestacks tower overhead, two of which were taken out of operation years ago. Inside, long lines of huge, gothic black machinery resemble locomotives abandoned in a dim train station.

The lights are out over what seem like acres of wooden shelves holding thousands of sheets of dusty glass.

The roof leaks.

New methods, complex shapes

But Carlex thinks this is the starting point for a play to expand its North American market share of windshields and side windows for cars and trucks.

Carlex peered into the neglected behemoth and saw a dusty jewel. It has begun investing $100 million to clean up the plant, modernize its equipment, demolish traces of its obsolete past, boost its capacity and use it to solicit more North American business -- ideally from the Detroit 3.

The company is betting on new technology, including a modern process called press-form. Unlike gravity-sag windshield shaping, the new process will permit greater manipulation of glass and provide the ability to handle more creative vehicle designs. The investment also will allow the plant to make thinner glass, according to customer desires. Thinner glass means less weight, which improves fuel economy.

The state of Tennessee is kicking in more money to help Carlex retrain and update the plant's 450 employees -- a fraction of the 3,500 workers who once produced windshields and windows for Ford Motor Co. there.

"Things are absolutely going to change here," declares Jim Shepherd, Carlex's executive vice president, who with his wife is moving to suburban Nashville from Detroit.

Sitting in his barren industrial office at the plant, with little more than a gray metal desk and a couple of metal-frame guest chairs from the era of black-and-white TV, Shepherd motions around the room. "We're going to knock down these walls. We're going to get away from this 1950s atmosphere."

Carlex will make the plant its North American headquarters, moving personnel there from the Detroit area, along with the suburban Detroit work force of Carlite, its newly acquired aftermarket auto-glass company.

"This place has been neglected, and we're going to fix that," Shepherd says. "The employees here might be a little jaded and uncertain about us, having been through so many owners who wanted to get rid of the business. But they will soon see we're serious.

"The biggest difference for us is that we're in the glass business. The others who came before weren't. They had their hands full with bigger concerns. Our only concern is making glass and windshields, and we believe this is the place to do it."

That, more or less, is the status of the 54-year-old glass plant.

But how the factory ended up at this juncture is a story that mirrors almost every trend that has come and gone in U.S. auto manufacturing for the past quarter century.

The industry's evolution from Eisenhower-era Big 3 hegemony to the Japanese invasion of the 1980s, the U.S.-Japanese joint-venture supplier bubble, the automaker divestitures of parts operations, the rise of megasuppliers in the late 1990s, the private-capital supplier wave -- it's all there in the run-up to Carlex's acquisition of the plant in April.

It all came and went.

The operation, originally created as the Ford Glass Plant, already was three decades old when Gary Casteel moved from Muscle Shoals, Ala., to work there as a young pipe fitter in 1988. As the in-house producer of much of Ford's North American windshields and windows, it was one of the biggest auto glass plants in the industry, with 1.8 million square feet under roof.

In the 1950s and 1960s, three enormous float lines heated the sand to 3,000 degrees in ovens that burn so bright they can only be viewed through hand-held black glass panels.

One of the Nashville plant's most notable features is that, unlike most glass factories, it houses the entire process. Workers bring raw sand in through one door, melt it and cook it into flawless glass. They then shape the glass, finish it, package it and ship complete windshields out the other door to vehicle assembly lines.

"I really don't know of any other plant in America that does it all," Casteel says.

Casteel was elected to the plant's UAW Local 737 bargaining committee in 1990. By that time the industry was under unfamiliar new pressures. Detroit was struggling through its second recession in a decade, and domestic market share was slipping away to import brands. Ford was eager to find new cost reductions and operating efficiencies, even if it meant divesting itself of some of its large in-house parts operations -- an issue the UAW resisted.

Today Casteel is director of the UAW's Region 8, a vast union territory stretching from Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina up through Tennessee and Virginia and into Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. "That plant always ran well," Casteel says. "We always had good labor relations."

Japanese partner

But Ford's component management team informed the union in 1990 that the glass operation needed to reach beyond Ford business. A new corner of the industry was rapidly emerging in the form of Japanese automakers assembling vehicles in U.S. plants. Nissan Motor Co. was expanding car and truck production just a few miles away in Smyrna, Tenn. Honda Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and others were opening assembly plants around the lower Midwest and Southeast.

But to gain glass business from such Asian transplants, Ford would need to form a separate joint-venture supply company in a deal with its large Japanese competitor, Central Glass.

"They told us: "We don't want to do anything to hurt the glass plant here,'" Casteel recalls. "But they said we really need to do this deal with Central to get more business."

The Ford-Central hookup was named Carlex, and the venture opened a separate state-of-the-art window fabricating plant in Vonore, Tenn., on the state's eastern edge.

Unwanted orphan

By the end of the 1990s, the industry was evolving again. This time, megasupplier mania was in the air. Individual component suppliers were merging and being acquired to roll up into multipart module and system supplier groups. The larger ones hoped to provide a sort of one-stop shopping for automakers, responsible for entire vehicle systems, including anything from a car's rolling chassis to its brakes and tailpipe and steering parts.

Amid great hoopla, General Motors spun off its vast global parts operations into an independent publicly traded entity, Delphi Corp. Ford similarly spun off its huge parts operations, including the Nashville glass plant, into a public megagroup dubbed Visteon Corp. [huge mistake]

Delphi went public in 1999 and Visteon in 2000 with visions of a bright future. But the ventures soon collapsed. In 2005, Delphi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Visteon followed in 2009.

By way of restructuring, Visteon identified 23 unwanted properties and business segments to unload -- among them, the Nashville glass plant. That decision in 2005 pushed the windshield factory off to new ownership by Automotive Components Holdings LLC, a safeguarding umbrella that sought yet another new owner.

A former Automotive Components Holdings manager, who asked not to be named, said the group's sole function was to "hold" and operate the glass plant with the other unwanted plants until viable buyers could be found.

Casteel also lent his time to finding a buyer for the plant.

"We approached everybody," he says.

"Nobody wanted it. The problem we encountered was that the only people who considered it were just after its book of Ford business. They thought they could move the business into their own plants and then close Nashville. We weren't going to let that happen."

Private equity buyer

The buyer who finally emerged in April 2007 was hardly a familiar auto industry name.

Robert Price, a wealthy investor from Tulsa, Okla., had made his fortune in commercial real estate and oil and gas investments. According to press reports at the time, Price was at least partly motivated by his desire to save the jobs at Ford's other glass factory in Tulsa. The older Nashville plant, along with a third glass operation in Juarez, Mexico, simply came with the package.

Price entrusted the operations to a newly formed entity first called simply Glass Products, and in 2008 renamed Zeledyne LLC. Zeledyne management drew from Ford's ranks of component executives, and the group took possession of the plants in 2008.

The deal wasn't unique; Price was part of a trend sweeping the supplier industry. Private investment companies were acquiring distressed parts makers at bargain prices, running them with independent management teams and hoping to use private capital to improve their profit picture.

Efforts to speak with Price or other members of the venture were unsuccessful.

But Price's timing couldn't have been worse. By mid-2008, the U.S. economy was teetering. By the third quarter, a banking crisis had locked up the capital markets, threatening business plans in all industries. By 2009, Zeledyne was frozen in place, along with most of the rest of the auto industry. Although the new team invested in Nashville enough to keep it operating, by 2010, the plant was again for sale.

Fresh investment at last

Carlex's Shepherd declines to say how much Central paid for the Nashville plant this year, noting that its acquisition did not include the Tulsa or Juarez factories. It did include Zeledyne's aftermarket glass business, Carlite.

Casteel believes the Japanese owner is in a good position to take the plant into new business deals. After 50 years of operation and more than 20 years of soliciting outside business, the plant no longer is owned by Ford.

It no longer is owned by a supplier in financial trouble. It no longer is owned by a private investor with an unproven track record. It no longer is being starved for capital improvements. It no longer is in jeopardy of being closed.

"We think we can help them get into GM and Chrysler now," Casteel says.

"These guys are serious global players. And they need this source of glass. I'm pretty excited about the future there. We've all been through a lot with that plant."

 

As I said, the union leaders ( Casteel ) has nothing but praises to say, all the while the people I know that worked there tell a very different story. I don't disagree that $30 per hour could be considered overpaid for what they did but $10 per hr for skilled workers that had 15+ years with the company?

Back during the '80s and '90s it was the typical big union plant. Overpaid workers that did absolutely nothing, having to call a electrician to plug in a extension cord, and having to call the janitor to pick a broom up that was left in the isle. The article alludes to that, 450 workers doing what it used to take 3,500 to do, so in a sense they did this to themselves. 

[grayhair]

There is a long and fascinating history of unions here in the U.S.  Early on they helped remedy things like child labor in factories, dangerous work environments, etc.  In modern times one could argue that weak management push-back allowed unions to bring "feather-bedding" to an art form.  An example:

My dad ran a large plastics plant back in the early '70s.  His complaint about unions was this extreme feather-bedding.  In one instance, a steam-jacketed pipe developed a small leak at a coupling.  What was needed was one man with two pipe wrenches to tighten the joint.  Union rules required this work be done by a team, including a pipe-fitter, a steam-fitter, a maintenance man, an instrument man, a safety man, and one other whose position I don't recall.  6 guys to do the job of one.  All at Sunday call-in triple time, 8 hours minimum pay x3, x6 guys.  Add in womb-to-tomb medical, dental, vision benefits for the workers entire family and anybody the worker ever met in his lifetime.  So, no wonder the plant eventually closed what with labor costs so totally out of control.  Production moved out of the country.  500 U.S. jobs lost.  A story repeated a 1000 times over in the U.S. manufacturing history.   

Edited July 29, 2016 by grayhair

[kscarbel2]

8 hours ago, grayhair said:

There is a long and fascinating history of unions here in the U.S.  Early on they helped remedy things like child labor in factories, dangerous work environments, etc.  In modern times one could argue that weak management push-back allowed unions to bring "feather-bedding" to an art form.  An example:

My dad ran a large plastics plant back in the early '70s.  His complaint about unions was this extreme feather-bedding.  In one instance, a steam-jacketed pipe developed a small leak at a coupling.  What was needed was one man with two pipe wrenches to tighten the joint.  Union rules required this work be done by a team, including a pipe-fitter, a steam-fitter, a maintenance man, an instrument man, a safety man, and one other whose position I don't recall.  6 guys to do the job of one.  All at Sunday call-in triple time, 8 hours minimum pay x3, x6 guys.  Add in womb-to-tomb medical, dental, vision benefits for the workers entire family and anybody the worker ever met in his lifetime.  So, no wonder the plant eventually closed what with labor costs so totally out of control.  Production moved out of the country.  500 U.S. jobs lost.  A story repeated a 1000 times over in the U.S. manufacturing history.   

This was the frustrating environment at Mack Trucks' Bridgewater, New Jersey, parts distribution center.

[grayhair]

Ha, thinking about unions in the '70s, several other real-life stories come to mind...

I recall an electrician who worked for Roblin Steel, Tonawanda, NY, during the daytime, 1st shift.  When his shift was over, he'd grab a sandwich and go to his second job working for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad.  Union rules at the time required an electrician on every train. The train he was assigned to went from Buffalo, NY to Erie, PA and back to Buffalo every night.  For his 20 years on the job, he slept in the caboose for the entire night, every night, and no one ever woke him up.  Rules at the time required a caboose so he had a nice warm place to sleep.  Roblin Steel mill and Erie Lackawanna are both defunct/gone.  No shocker there.  Not saying the unions killed them, but they sure were part of the financial picture.

And here's another beauty since I'm in a story telling mode...

As a young guy just out of school, I'm working at an electronics distribution company as an inside salesman.  A guy from the Ford Stamping plant (Buffalo, NY) calls me to place an order.  He orders a pallet of Rayovac D-cells and a 1000 PR2 bulbs.  (A pallet is a shit-load of batteries.)  I ask him what in the world is he going to do with all those batteries.  He says the union electricians, every one, all three shifts, upon arrival claim they can't do any work because their flashlight batteries are dead or the bulb is burned out.  Solution to the problem:  New procedure, each electrician draws 2 new batteries and a new bulb when he punches in at the time clock.  You gotta love it!   

Edited July 30, 2016 by grayhair

[BillyT]

Gray hair I lost my keyboard again,I'm digitally. Challenged! I could go on til daybreak on this topic first the half rate backhaul,you picked a fronthaul at  full rate(twice master freight rate)based on the fact you deadbeat home.then you pick a backhaul at master

[BillyT]

Gray hair,u still awake? When I owned the hotshot rig I was leased to cardinal transport ( not cardinal freight carriers,a rate cutting dry freight outfit) we ran out of warren oh.One of our accts.was a union co that maintained power plants and paper mills. There was a power plant in Colorado springs co.The workers needed 300pair of welding gloves on Monday morning or they wouldn't work.That's about 150lbs.They were paying  1.40

[BillyT]

A mile 1989.for a tractor trl  .25cents a mile for a co driver ! It was Friday afternoon,1500mi .A one man run. One of our o/o took his wife in his S 10 pickup and put the 300 pair of gloves in back! Kinda reminds me of the bulbs and batteries!One of my buddies worked  In Homestead Works in the locomotive shop. They routinely would punch each other in and out(when one guy stayed home).A United steel worker got 1 wks of vacation for every wk worked.20yrs wkd. 20wks vac!wouldnt

[BillyT]

Don't get me wrong,I support organized labor(as it was meant to be,not a free ride!) I was once a freight car repairman at the long defunct  Pgh and Lake Erie RR in Mckees Rocks Pa.My 1st day I'm watching this really old guy dragging a sheet of 3/4"plywood,I'm thinking what a hard worker! He dragged it under a caboose and went to sleep on it in plain view!! You start out as a laborer  then a helper or freight car repairman.So I'm a laborer and I'm sweeping the floor and this guy comes up to me What the f..k do you think you're doing?,you're working too hard ! You're making  us look bad! I'm not breaking a sweat,easiest job I ever had!

[david wild]

OK , I tell my story one more time, We are hauling GE turbine power plants into Shoreham on the Island, as I pull in there is part of a power line laying in the road, not wanting to damage it, I moved it to the side of the road (maybe 2 feet) union stopped job, had to go to some BS meeting and we all went back to work, next day, pull in, cable in road again, not wanting to touch the cable again, I found a rope, made a lasso and moved the cable, I did not touch the cable, which is what shut job down first time, that is what I got in trouble for the first time, I touched the cable, when I should have gotten a union turd to move it, problem was at the meeting the first time they could not even tell me which turd would have been the right one to move it ???  shut job down second time. We supplied the cranes for the job, they were unloaded and parked, since we rented them to GE I checked them out myself, when I was seen operating one of the cranes we stopped the job again, this time I had them by their balls, my cranes, can't stop me from operating it till they signed over the rental slip, this is right after 911, there are no cranes to be had in NY, they are all rented, here I sit with the only cranes and I get my ass kissed or the cranes go home and all the union turds don't have a job, after that they let do anything I wanted,  no more shut downs and we all got along great, at least from my point of view, they were really glad to see me go home. you see union turds understand the person holding your nuts is the one who calls the shots.     

[HeavyGunner]

A few years ago there were a few big construction jobs in my area and there were a bunch of union steel workers staying in town. I befriended some of them and ended up at the lake with some of them on the 4th of July. Some of them decided to try some cliff jumping and the ding a lings didn't bother to check the water depth. Long story short one guy jumped, water was not as deep as he would've liked and he hurt his leg. All the union guys there told him to show up to work and get "injured" on he job so he can still collect a paycheck. He did and his broken leg was covered and he still collected his paycheck. 

Edited July 31, 2016 by HeavyGunner

[m16ty]

We once did a job at a aircraft plant changing some fixtures on one of their big gantry mills. They had two identical projects and were crunched on time. They awarded one to us and the other identical project to a union outfit. Two identical jobs, we got ours done in 2 1/2 days, it took the union outfit 6 weeks. I will admit we busted our butt because we had three open days to do it in normal hours. After three days we would have to work 3rd shift. With the motivation of not wanting to work midnights, we got it done. It was still 4 guys for 2 1/2 days vs. 6 union guys for 6 weeks.

Needless to say, when a similar job came up a little while latter, they didn't even call the union outfit.    

[david wild]

Good job

[TeamsterGrrrl]

You guys still haven't figured it out... Still working your butts off! Here I sit at 66 enjoying my 11th year of retirement, do what I want, get up when I want, etc... All thanks to a union pension!

[m16ty]

On the aircraft job I mentioned above, we got paid the same amount as the union outfit. So they made the same amount of money working 6 weeks as we did working 2 1/2 days, now who seems like the smart one?  Bust your butt, get the job done, and move on to the next one.

[BillyT]

On 7/29/2016 at 8:25 PM, grayhair said:

Ha, thinking about unions in the '70s, several other real-life stories come to mind...

I recall an electrician who worked for Roblin Steel, Tonawanda, NY, during the daytime, 1st shift.  When his shift was over, he'd grab a sandwich and go to his second job working for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad.  Union rules at the time required an electrician on every train. The train he was assigned to went from Buffalo, NY to Erie, PA and back to Buffalo every night.  For his 20 years on the job, he slept in the caboose for the entire night, every night, and no one ever woke him up.  Rules at the time required a caboose so he had a nice warm place to sleep.  Roblin Steel mill and Erie Lackawanna are both defunct/gone.  No shocker there.  Not saying the unions killed them, but they sure were part of the financial picture.

And here's another beauty since I'm in a story telling mode...

As a young guy just out of school, I'm working at an electronics distribution company as an inside salesman.  A guy from the Ford Stamping plant (Buffalo, NY) calls me to place an order.  He orders a pallet of Rayovac D-cells and a 1000 PR2 bulbs.  (A pallet is a shit-load of batteries.)  I ask him what in the world is he going to do with all those batteries.  He says the union electricians, every one, all three shifts, upon arrival claim they can't do any work because their flashlight batteries are dead or the bulb is burned out.  Solution to the problem:  New procedure, each electrician draws 2 new batteries and a new bulb when he punches in at the time clock.  You gotta love it!   

 

[grayhair]

8 hours ago, TeamsterGrrrl said:

You guys still haven't figured it out... Still working your butts off! Here I sit at 66 enjoying my 11th year of retirement, do what I want, get up when I want, etc... All thanks to a union pension!

Different strokes for different folks I guess.  Here I sit at 67 enjoying my first year of retirement, do what I want, get up when I want, etc...  All thanks to my hard work in non-union jobs.  If everyone in the U.S. was in a union, productivity would soon drop to near zero, and our economy would cease to function.

I counseled my children on careers to 1) do what you enjoy and feel good about and feel productive, 2. find a career job that requires you to be physically on-site so your job doesn't get off-shored, and 3. make sure your compensation is fair and don't agree to be underpaid for long because you can't recover the lost years.

[HeavyGunner]

So true grayhair.  Like it was said above unions started out as a very noble thing that gave underpaid over worked labor workers a fair wage. But like so many other things that started out with good intentions the pendulum swung waaaay to far the other way and now it's not a good thing. In my opinion the vast majority of unions do the very bare minimum as far as work goes but want the highest possible wage and bennies. Sorry but that business model doesn't work. When workers plan their day by their breaks and not around their work there is a problem. 

[Underdog]

You guys still haven't figured it out... Still working your butts off! Here I sit at 66 enjoying my 11th year of retirement, do what I want, get up when I want, etc... All thanks to a union pension!

And that's why all the old teamster companies are long gone... Completely unsustainable benefits and retirement in today's market. Like it or not, companies have to be lean & mean to compete in a global economy. You retired at least 10 years too early, when you still had value to provide, and have been living off the backs of others' labor ever since.