Laid-off GM worker files complaint against UAW

By BRENT SNAVELY
Free Press Business Writer
October 27, 2010

A laid-off worker at General Motors’ Orion Assembly plant filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board Monday in Detroit against the UAW for negotiating a deal to employ 40% of the workers at a lower wage rate. Nick Waun, 31, of Lapeer said the UAW negotiated the agreement without giving workers a chance to consider it.

“The main thrust of this is to try to get a vote on the agreement, because they denied us a vote,” Waun said today. Waun said he filed his complaint as an individual because of the NLRB’s requirements, but said many other workers at the Orion plant are also upset and wish to challenge it.

Nancy Cleeland, spokeswoman for the NLRB, said the complaint would be investigated and said the agency would hold an administrative hearing if there is merit to the charge.

Workers were first told about the details of the UAW’s Orion agreement on Oct. 3. The agreement calls for 40% of the workers at the plant to be paid a second-tier wage of about $14 per hour which is about half the $28 that tier-one workers make.

In 2007, the UAW reached agreements with all three of the domestic automakers that allow the companies to hire new workers at the second-tier wage rage and sets a cap for the second-tier wages of between 20% and 30% each automaker’s national workforce. But GM and Chrysler’s caps were suspended last year until 2015, said Kristin Dziczek, director of labor and industry for the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. Still, UAW officials say the deal at the Orion plant applies to only that plant. Workers who are upset by the agreement fear that General Motors and other automakers will use it as a precedent at other plants.

UAW officials have said the agreement was possible because of contract modifications approved by its national membership last year. But Waun said workers were told only that the contract changes would allow the company and the union to craft “innovative” staffing strategies. “They never mentioned they were going to cut 40% of the workforces’ pay in half,” Waun said.

UAW President Bob King told the Free Press earlier this month that the deal prevented the Orion plant from closing and said the agreement is specific to that plant. The deal, King said, allows General Motors to build a subcompact car profitably in the U.S. for the first time. “We have made it very, very clear that this is only for a small car,” King said on Oct. 16, the day that nearly 200 UAW members and retirees protested the agreement in front of the union’s headquarters. King also said that the workers have the right to appeal the agreement. An appeal could go to the UAW’s Public Review Board.

That review board considers ethical charges and possible violations of the UAW constitution, said Barbara Klein, executive director of the Public Review Board.

Waun said he and other workers were planning to file a complaint with the union, and still may do so, but decided it also was important to take the issue to an independent authority.

Established in 1957, the Public Review Board consists of seven members who are nominated by the UAW’s president and approved by the union’s International Executive Board.

“It’s gotten to the point where we no longer think an internal appeal will not have an effect because it is controlled by the UAW,” Waun said.