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The Sophie Flyer

By Tom Laney

UAW Local 879

Hi folks,

Just finished reading the St. Paul paper and several quotes from people in the company and uaw who "feel bad" about all the job loss.

I guess they should feel bad.

At the same time they are not taking any responsibility for what they have done and are continuing to do, even though its so obvious now how badly they are hurting people.

McKenzie says he feels bad for the Edison chairman. I suppose the Edison chairman would feel bad for us if we were closing instead of them. That is the level of unionism between these two guys who led us into dog eat dog with each other. They feel bad when what they make happen, happens.

We've had many opportunities to work together with Edison workers to build trust and confidence and power between our locals. But we, the workers in these two locals, were prevented from working together by our leaders who now feel bad.

We were the last two assembly plants to have seat work for instance. The uaw and ford were doing a domino thing with the locals, outsourcing this work provincially in a one by one assembly plant attack plan that revealed local to local unity as a bad joke. We could easily have reversed this job loss trend by simply working together and striking the company together or at least slowing down together. We could have started a new pattern of fighting to retain unionized work that could have restored outsourced work everywhere. Who knows what might have happened if we had been able to work together with our Edison brothers and sisters like a Union?

Instead, they, our leaders, cheated on each other and made sundry concessions to compete against each other which brings us to where we are now. We are facing even more concessions here while feeling bad but blowing taps for the brothers and sisters in New Jersey and elsewhere.

Where does all this lead us? Who did this? It leads us into ever more loss and pain and "feeling bad".

But we the workers are not doing this, we are not doing this, our "leaders" are. If we even had democratic leaders, if we just had leaders who allowed common sense, promoted and facilitated union discussion about all this, we would have worked our way to actions that would be completely different, very powerful union actions that would have changed our jobs and future for the better. We never have a chance, at any level of the uaw to have such a conversation. Instead, everything is manipulated by forces of favoritsim and dictatorship to the negativity of competitiveness and survival of the cheapest. We can't blame Jac Nasser for this. We have to blame the uaw leaders. And, in fairness none of this originated with Franchino and McKenzie, its been going on for a long, long time.

Little groups of uaw leaders in all the locals routinely compete against each other without ever asking the workers if this is what they want? They simply explain it as life in the uaw, "everybody" is doing it, what can we do they did it first, etc. These plants are closing because we no longer have a union that concerns itself with anything but competition between workers at every level. It has

destroyed our union.

The statements from Yokich and Gettelfinger are all about taking credit for their downsizing, "job security" agreements which give more transition money than workers would get in most places. The job security agreements prior to yesterday's announcement had cost us around 750,000 uaw jobs since the early 80's. Tack another 22,000 now at Ford plus whatever other number is brewing now from the leaders' view that we have to get even more competitive. Real unions would be fighting now for a return of these jobs when the business picks up.

But the fact is, these jobs are gone forever. Also gone are the 5-6 jobs created in the greater community for every basic big 3 uaw job. All we get on that, are observations that it is just too bad, but that's life in the big corporate society. The uaw is helping with the downsizing because their view is that this is what's needed for an efficient, competitive highly profitable corporation. They are not interested in the social cost of their position, they have no quarrel with the corporation at all other than maybe

their tee times in Palm Springs.

Locally, they will make it increasingly clear that this is only the beginning. The annoucement makes all the fear programs that much more effctive and harder to deal with. They are going to say, more than ever, that the workers will have to constantly strive to be more competitive which we know translates into continual concessions with more favoritism to control those with union values. They will use this announcement to enhance their own credibility, to say that all the favoritism, the fps crap and the dog eat dog worked to protect us here when in fact, it has done just the

opposite by destroying solidarity between our local unions. They will have the big business mayor on their side and the dopey governor and every other politician they've sucked up to. McKenzie and Franchino and Harrod wil trot their sorry asses around in the election campaign as the guys who saved our plant and maybe they did but at what cost to someone else and at what cost to solidarity? And, how long would they be able to do this? Who would stand up with us if forduaw said they were going to close us? Wouldn't there just be an interview from some uaw dog eat dog survivor like McKenzie saying how bad he felt about it all?

If we can look out on the shop floor and find people in the midst of all this competitive hysteria and promotion of me, me, me; and find folks who would fight for their partner's job that would be proof that we could go about all this in a Union, solidarity way. We have members working on this in the solidarity committee who offer an entirely different approach to what needs doing. We have some people beyond that too who continue to act like union members who are not interested in working in any organized way

but stil stand up like union people every day. I don't know if they will ever be able to change the way the uaw operates tho. But we could find others like ourselves outside the uaw system to talk about how we could force the reopening of these plants by winning a reduced work week and other labor intensive devices.

The last time this closure thing happened there were alot of people who had thrown fuel on the concessions fire too. They cost us a lot of jobs but they "felt bad" when their actions cost others their livelihoods. The "reformer" action that came out of all this at the time ewas to get people elected in the locals who would fight for solidarity and a democratic union. As we can all see, this strategy does not work. Mckenzie and

Franchino, in one degree or another, were some of those reformers who turned

out to be a lot smaller than the system. They wound up being part of the

problem and now they feel bad.

We need to find a way to connect people around our plant and between our plants who have good union principles and are willing to act on them. It is the only thing that is going to change all this dog eat dog stuff.

Otherwise, we'll just keep reading and feeling bad about the uaw's victims.

Tom