"Full Pay for Short Day a Key Issue in G.M. Strike"
By KEITH BRADSHER
July 8, 1998
FLINT, Mich. -- Until the strike began a month ago,
Steven White's workday at a General Motors parts
factory here followed a familiar routine. Arriving at
6:30 every morning, he stood at an assembly line
welding steel rails in semidarkness, wearing heavy
protective clothing in a factory with no
air-conditioning and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees
on summer days.
White's job has been to grab a 30-pound, six-foot-long
steel rail from a conveyor belt with his right hand,
pull it across to his left hand, lower it into a brace
and weld a bumper bracket on the side. He has to do the
work partly by feel, he said, because a low ceiling was
erected several years ago over his place on the line to
ward off a leak in the 45-year-old factory's roof, and
no light has been installed under the ceiling.
What makes White's job controversial, and one of the
core issues in a showdown between G.M. and the United
Automobile Workers union, is the hours that he keeps.
"If everything runs without any breakdowns, we'll get
done by 1:30 or 2," including a half-hour lunch break,
White said. For working six and a half or seven hours,
White draws eight hours' pay, at $19 an hour.
G.M. is now fighting to eliminate the practice of
allowing White and others here to go home early with
full pay if they produce a certain number of parts.
G.M. has delayed plans to invest $180 million in
White's factory until the union agrees to abolish the
practice, known as a "pegged rate." But the U.A.W. has
resisted, noting that a local agreement last year with
G.M. already calls for the practice to be phased out
for any new auto parts production assigned to the
factory.
The strike by 3,200 workers at the factory here,
combined with a three-week-old strike by nearly 6,000
sympathetic workers at another G.M. auto parts factory
in Flint, has crippled production at the world's
largest company. G.M. has closed 26 of its 29 assembly
plants in North America for lack of parts and has
declared an after-tax loss of $1.18 billion through
June 30. The strikes have forced G.M. to lay off
162,700 workers temporarily, while outside suppliers
have laid off thousands more.
After weeks of barely talking to each other, G.M. and
U.A.W. negotiators began bargaining in earnest on
Friday and talked through the holiday weekend. Richard
Shoemaker, the U.A.W.'s vice president for G.M. issues,
said Monday that the talks had been "constructive," but
he would not predict when a settlement might be
reached. Both sides are trying to have a deal ratified
by workers in time for G.M. factories to reopen next
Monday, the end of the automaker's regularly scheduled
two-week summer shutdown.
Pegged rates were common in the auto industry in the
late 1940s, when foreign automakers posed little threat
to domestic companies and the U.A.W.'s power was at its
height. The rates have virtually disappeared since
then, as companies have demanded longer hours to become
more competitive. Indeed, many long-time industry
executives were surprised to learn they still existed.
"It's astounding to me to find G.M still has those
practices," said Gerald Meyers, the retired chairman of
American Motors Corp., which eliminated pegged rates in
the 1950s. The U.A.W.'s current national agreements
with the Big Three automakers do not include such
rates.
But they have persisted in a few G.M. parts factories
where local U.A.W. units have negotiated separate
deals. These are factories that produce parts needed by
so many assembly plants for so many car and truck
models that G.M. decided to pay the rates rather than
risk a strike -- until now, that is.
About 600 of the 3,200 workers here are covered by
pegged rates, mainly welders who build engine cradles,
which are lattices of steel bars that support a car or
truck engine. These workers put in four and a half to
six and a half hours a day and draw a full day's pay,
said Peter Ternes, a G.M. spokesman.
Workers on the picket line here said that only about
100 people who were especially proficient at their
tasks were able to finish in just four and a half
hours. Ternes said that two of the six engine cradle
production lines had people on the shortest hours, but
did not give a precise number. Workers are not allowed
to leave the factory until they have spent eight hours
inside, but can take a break until the end of their
shift once they have made enough auto parts.
Because those covered by pegged rates have been leaving
early, G.M. had to pay $33 million in unnecessary
overtime last year, said Donald Hackworth, group vice
president for North American car operations. The
overtime contributed heavily to a $50 million loss for
the factory, he said, adding, "The insidious work
practice here quite frankly is totally noncompetitive
and we've got to do something about it."
Outside experts have also found the factory to be
inefficient. Harbour & Associates, a manufacturing
consulting firm in Troy, Mich., has concluded that
labor costs at G.M.'s steel parts factories are higher
than any competitors' costs -- and that the Flint
factory has unusually high costs even by G.M.
standards.
But Norwood Jewell, the bargaining committee chairman
of the local union here, said that the inefficiency was
G.M.'s fault. Unlike the assembly lines in other
factories, certain slow-moving equipment here is
connected directly to the main production line, instead
of making parts separately nearby, he said. This hurts
productivity because the entire line must operate at
the speed of the slowest equipment, Jewell said, adding
that G.M. had already told him of plans to change the
factory's layout.
Poor productivity has "nothing to do with our people,
nothing to do with standards or pegged rates," Jewell
said. "It's poor engineering."
Jewell said that the union was concerned about the
health and safety of its members. G.M.'s Ternes said
that the factory here had the lowest injury rate of any
of G.M.'s 18 metal parts factories. But among workers
on the picket line, fear of injuries was a frequent
refrain, along with a strong desire for G.M. to invest
more money in the factory.
Brenda Domby said that her production line, which makes
engine cradles for Oldsmobile Auroras and Buick Park
Avenues, had very little automation because it was not
originally designed for the high output that G.M. now
expects. Mrs. Domby said that she had to pull 55-pound
engine cradles by hand from a conveyor belt 40 times an
hour, weld steering gear brackets onto the cradles and
then push the cradles on to the next worker.
"They get hung up, and then you have to pull and tug
them," Mrs. Domby, a slender woman of average height,
said.
Sabrina Johnson, who uses a robot to weld the heaviest
steel bars in the cradles for G.M.'s mid-size sedans,
said that it was hard to finish work early because the
bars were often poorly shaped and had to be pounded by
hand with hammers. "They run these bad parts for hours
and we have to fit them together," she said. "You're
beating them and you're hammering them."
Ms. Johnson said that the pegged rates improved
productivity, by giving workers an incentive to work
harder. "When you set a goal, you work to achieve it,
you feel good," she said.
But other automakers have achieved high output without
pegged rates, partly by running production lines at
speeds that require workers to move briskly.
Equipment breakdowns are a common complaint here. White
said that when he was given his current task in 1995,
he did not get a backup welding gun, unlike other
workers. As a result, he said, he frequently worked
overtime because his gun broke down. After three years
of steady complaints, he was given a backup gun in
April.
Ternes said that the automaker had already invested
$400 million in maintenance and new equipment.
James Blakemore, who does the final welding of cradles
for Chevrolet Astro vans, said that he earned the right
to leave work an hour early if he produced enough parts
under conditions that are often difficult. "The
management doesn't know what they're talking about when
they say these are easy jobs" because of the shorter
hours, he said.
But Blakemore said that with pegged rates already
eliminated for new parts being produced by the factory,
he and other workers would not keep their current work
rules forever. "They're going away and we understand
that and we accept that," he said.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company. |
