Hi,

My name is Bruce Backhaus, and in May of '99, 21 UAW members and I transferred from Saturn to Delphi-Adrian Michigan. That's when the real problems began. Most of us left Saturn, due to homesickness and related reasons for having to live 600 miles from our relatives. We were under the assumption that we were finally free from the negative working conditions associated with having had to work at Saturn. Alas, this was not to be. From the moment we entered our new facility, we have been castigated and set apart from the rest of our union brothers as somehow being different.

The crux of the matter is this: according to the union hierarchy, the day we signed papers to leave Saturn to return home is now our new GM seniority date, which means we now have approximately eight months total corporate seniority towards our ability to transfer to another GM facility.

The plant we are in at the moment is in a closing mode; production of the components we manufacture are being transferred to scab suppliers and to Mexico.

We are loyal union employees with corporate seniority ranging from 5 to 28 yrs. We are given no answers as to the effect a plant closing will have upon us, concerning recall rights, benefits, unemployment, GIS and our ability to remain employed with the company.

We have been set adrift by our own union, without any recourse or even the common courtesy of an answer. All of us have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board.....charging the local and international union with refusal to represent us.

I come from a long line of UAW workers, as most of my family either work now or are retired from GM or Ford, my father retired with 38.9 yrs. from Willow Run and my great uncle before him was at Flint #1, during the sit down strikes so long ago that helped define industrial unionism in this country! Maybe it is time for the rank and file of this great institution to take back what is rightfully ours.

I hope and pray that someday we will once again be able to stand together truly as brothers and sisters and be a force in this country for the cause of industrial unionism!!

Yours in Solidarity,
Bruce William Backhaus
Local 2031 UAW

***

Hi Bruce and all,

I think Bruce's situation is again proof that the UAW is more interested in competition than solidarity and that seniority rights in particular are the essence of unionism when we think of these rights as fundamental to a union culture. Defending these rights is not competitive and that's why these rights are continually replaced with favoritism in a corporate culture.

The UAW wants us to think we are all in a hopeless position...that whatever benefits competitiveness will be the order of the day. Sourcing out work, which in most cases happens to be high seniority work, is a UAW attack on unionism. Facilitating plant and shift closures, placing seniority work rules in direct competition with non-union workers, playing one UAW local against others, driving fear into auto workers at every opportunity, bolstering corporate propaganda and continually elevating the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism, destroyed the UAW long ago as a fighting vehicle for workers. Today, the UAW fights us. They fought us in Flint, at CAT, at Ford, at Saturn and everywhere else auto workers have tried to resist dog-eat-dog competition.

The key to the UAW's strategy is to convince as many auto workers as they can to not have confidence and trust in each other. But although 25 years have now passed since the UAW formally turned to dog-eat-dog competition, and although the UAW has expended $100's of millions to persuade us that workers' real values are selfishness and individualism, the fact is that everyday on the job most people still support one another, or want to.

We do not need the UAW "to once again stand together." That is one right they can't take away from us. We'll always have this right, and writing to each other about our problems and the injustices at work is the first step toward doing something about them.

We need a network of auto workers, other workers, farmers, employed and unemployed talking not about the lean workplace and lean society but what kind of world we want for our kids and grandkids. We should talk about all the things that make auto workers feel good about each other and forget about the UAW except as the UAW applies to capitalism. And we should make clear that any system run by people who think they are better than other people—capitalism, communism, ANY system antithetical to democracy, solidarity and equality—is unacceptable.

We can do this ourselves by simply continuing to resist the attacks on real union values while talking about how to build a real labor movement and society based on our own values and not those values of the corporation and UAW.

Years ago UAW organizers did this in the face of much larger obstacles than we face today. They did it by taking solidarity strategies from plant to plant. Why don't we start talking about how we can do that and do it in such a principled way that every good auto worker on the job can see the common sense and reasonableness of promoting solidarity, equality and democracy?

I think most people I work with are fed up with the UAW. But local union elections are always seen as the outlet for rage, a quick fix to the sellouts of the people we just elected months before. Twenty-five years down the road of company unionism, we are still encouraging great people to come off their jobs on the line or in the trades where they are such great unionists, and go into an entirely different world of cutthroat business. Most of them don't last very long as we know. A few, like Dave Yettaw and the New Directions Caucus at Local 599, are able to withstand UAW attacks for a few years, and in 599's case even give us a model local union; but in the end they are no match for the subterfuge, the dishonesty, the ruthlessness and power of the UAW machine. We wind up with great people being funneled into impossible situations and worn out.

We need to find a way to get people into a movement that is inspirational, that allows and encourages people to grow with solidarity, defend democracy and equality, and in turn inspire the rest of us.

This can be done by people making their own connections and talking about how we make workers' appreciation of solidarity the prevailing value in all our workplaces. To do it any other way, especially the electoral way, is going to waste a whole lot of good people. To do it the way we've already started here, by having simple conversations among each other, will eventually get us a democratic movement and a better world.

In 1983 Ford began the "preferential" transfer program. The UAW supported this program, which meant that Ford could cut costs by keeping assembly plants closed, placing remaining plants on overtime and staffing these plants with workers from closed plants. Some people in my local reacted to the newcomers as Bruce describes. There were others in my local who defended new workers on the job, who refused to allow the UAW and Ford to send many of these workers back home for not being "capable" if the workers wanted to stay, there were invitations from local workers to newcomers for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, there were loans and grants not from the company or UAW in the early days of this program but out of the pockets of ordinary workers. There was help for the homesick and later help for a lot of new people who seemed to quickly develop drug and alcohol problems. Always, the first hands for help were those of ordinary auto workers.

In my plant, I can find any sort of auto worker I want to look for. I often get frustrated and angry that the bums in the union seem to be in a lot of places. But most of the time I feel good about the folks I work with because they really are good people. It took me a while to see how the new UAW and the dog-eat-dog conditions all of us to think the worst of most of us. I got over this by looking very mechanically for daily evidence that most workers still want to support most other workers.

Face it, the corporations and UAW have tried their best to do a big number on us. But we'll always be there, as your letters confirm.

Tom Laney
UAW Local 879

Originally published in New Democracy Newsletter, March-April 2000. (Tom Laney has been an autoworker and member of UAW Local 879 in St. Paul for 25 years and was president for four years).

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