Union walkout at Chrysler ends after 6 hours
DETROIT: A new expression is making the rounds here in the American automotive capital: “Hollywood strike,” as in, “just for show.”
That saying is likely to gain currency after the United Automobile Workers reached a tentative agreement Wednesday with Chrysler, only six hours after union leaders sent Chryslers 45,000 workers to the picket lines.
Just last month, the UAW struck General Motors but settled two days later, despite the unions declaring at the outset that the two sides were far apart on fundamental issues.
The brief walkouts appear to have emerged as a way for both union leaders and company managers, at a time of deep troubles in their industry, to prove to their constituents that they got the best deal they could under the circumstances, without the damage of an all-out war.
Given the industrys financial woes, neither side can afford a drawn-out battle.
“It isnt the time to have a life or death struggle,” said John Paul MacDuffie, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the GM settlement, both sides made concessions and claimed victory. The union won job guarantees for its members, for example, while the company was able to offload its enormous health-care liability into a separate trust.
Full details of the Chrysler agreement were not immediately available, but it was expected to echo the GM contract.
Chrysler executives were said to be seeking flexibility to import vehicles from outside the United States, to take advantage of cheaper labor costs. Chrysler is set to begin selling Chinese-built small cars at the end of the decade, making it the first American automaker to use China as an export source for the United States.
The likely duration of the strike at Chrysler was particularly uncertain because of its new owner, Cerberus Capital Management. The private equity firm bought the company this year and vowed that it would make the company more flexible in its operations.
Such short national walkouts are a recent phenomenon in the auto industry. Historically, strikes have lasted for months, inflicting deep financial pain on both workers and their companies. But the industry was relatively healthy then.
In 1950, for example, Chrysler workers were off the job for 104 days in a dispute over pension benefits. In 1998, GM workers went on strike in Flint, Michigan, for seven weeks in a walkout that crippled production nationwide and cost GM market share that it never recovered.
On Wednesday, by contrast, it was possible for a worker to march on the picket line at lunch and hear about the settlement on the evening news.
Rod Hartsfield, 46, a union steward at Chryslers stamping plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, said Wednesday night that he was glad to be headed back to work. “A long, drawn-out strike doesnt help anybody,” he said.
The Chrysler strike did not have the impact it might have had last week, before the company announced layoffs at five factories. As a result, about 12,000 workers, or more than a quarter of Chrysler union members, did not take part in the strike, because their plants were temporarily closed to adjust inventories of unsold cars and trucks.
The unions president, Ron Gettelfinger, described the settlement as a victory.
“This agreement was made possible because UAW workers made it clear to Chrysler that we needed an agreement that rewards the contributions they have made to the success of this company,” he said.
But Gettelfinger, who is leading his second and final set of national contract negotiations, had limited options, given the billions of dollars in losses and thousands of jobs cut by Detroit companies in recent years.
“He has such a weak hand to play,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, author of “The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit,” a 1995 biography of Walter Reuther, the unions legendary president. “Frankly, Im not sure he could do otherwise, considering the circumstance.”
Some workers questioned whether the two sides were as far apart as a strike suggests.
“I think what hes doing with these strikes is kind of suspicious,” Paul Wohlfarth, a 30-year Chrysler employee who works at a Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, said of Gettelfinger. The short strikes could be intended to make workers “think that this deal was the best he could get,” he said.
Meanwhile, GM workers approved their agreement Wednesday, the union said in a separate statement. Among production workers, the tally was 66 percent in favor, while 64 percent of the skilled trades workers voted for the contract.
