Tesi John B. Schnapp, ex capo della società di consulenza automobilistica Mercer Management Consulting:
Contrappone
UAW (United Automobile Workers) = sindacato antagonistico
a
IG-Metall (GER) = sindacato collaborativo
+ cenni biografici su Walter Reuter, fondatore UAW.
- GM + Ford tagliano 60mila posti
in 6 anni, ma non riesce ad ottenere più che simboliche concessioni da UAW, - il cui presidente, Ron
Gettlefinger, ha faticato a far passare (51% contro 49%) una proposta di
modesta rinuncia a benefici sanitari, ed è stato accusato di collaborazionismo
dalla base radicale. - La prossima tornata contrattuale
che si apre nel 2007 rischia di segnare il disastro per l’auto USA, in
stridente contrasto con Germania, dove sindacati senza fragore stanno firmando
accordi su misura “per proteggere i posti di lavoro e preservare i datori di
lavoro”. - Linea UAW è eredità (oggi obsoleta
e perdente) di - Walter Reuther (1907-70):
- figlio di immigrato ardentemente
socialista - col quale nel 1917 visitò Eugene
Debs [Socialist Party], in prigione per l’opposizione alla guerra, cosa che
lasciò in lui traccia indelebile; - divenne un provetto attrezzista e
stampista alla Ford. - Durante la Grande Depressione,
lavorò con suo fratello Victor 2 anni alla Fabbrica Auto Gorki in URSS,
progettata da Ford per Stalin. “Dall’esperienza Reuter trasse una ferma
antipatia nei confronti del “comunismo” e delle correnti sindacali comuniste,
ritenendo che esse “subordinassero cinicamente gli interessi dei lavoratori
all’ambizione politica”. - Il 26 maggio 1937 Reuther
partecipò al primo volantinaggio ad una porta dello stabilimento Ford di River
Rouge, con più di 50 attivisti, che vennero affrontati da uomini Ford con banda
gangster assoldati da Ford e massacrati con spranghe (passata alla storia come
“battaglia del sovrappasso”). - La lotta, con occupazione degli
stabilimenti, e il sostegno del National Labor Relations Board istituito da
Roosevelt, portò alla sindacalizzazione delle fabbriche auto USA. - 1946 Reuther divenne presidente
UAW dopo lunga lotta contro la fazione di Homer Martin, George Addes e Richard
Frankensteen, considerata comunista (nel 1948 divenne invalido a un braccio
causa sparatoria dalla finestra della sua cucina, che sarebbe stata legata a
scontri interni). - “Duro e tatticamente brillante
negoziatore”, inventò il sistema della “società-bersaglio” (per ogni contratto,
scelta una sola società con cui aprire la vertenza e scioperare, per poi
generalizzare le conquiste). - 1948 inventò la scala mobile
(aziendale) dei salari per recupero automatico inflazione. - Reuther pose le basi di un’intera
panoplia di benefici “che ora contribuiscono alla generale sclerosi da costi di
GM e Ford”. - Ma pesa soprattutto l’eredità
“filosofica” di Reuther: - l’aver coltivato tra i lavoratori
“un senso di attaccamento primario al sindacato anziché al datore di lavoro,
visto come un avversario da combattere”, e - il rifiuto di differenziare i
contratti tra le case auto: medesimi salari, orari, benefici, normativa, anche
nelle case più deboli, le quali (Studebaker, Hudson, Packard) scomparvero negli
anni ’40 e ’50. La crescita complessiva garantiva la riassunzione dei membri
UAW licenziati. - 1980 il successore di Reuther,
Douglas Fraser fece delle concessioni alla Chrysler di Iacocca, ed entrò nel
suo CdA, cosa che permise il salvataggio della società, insieme a una garanzia
dello Stato. - Quando Reuther morì le case
americane detenevano ancora l’87% del mercato USA: non poteva prevedere
l’attuale situazione competitiva. Proprio nel 1970 vi fu uno sciopero UAW di
tre mesi alla GM, che bloccò la produzione di oltre un milione di veicoli. - La tradizione conflittuale
impedisce ad UAW di cercare dei do ut des che permettano a GM e Ford di evitare
la bancarotta, che ne danneggerebbe la credibilità tra la clientela e
porterebbe allo svuotamento dei contratti collettivi. - IG-Metall al contrario
firma con le aziende quei contratti specifici che Reuther aborriva, per
impedire il trasferimento della produzione in località a più bassi salari. Le
più frequenti concessioni dei sindacati tedeschi hanno concesso agli
imprenditori un maggior controllo sugli orari di lavoro, hanno esteso la
giornata lavorativa senza aumento retributivo, fissato salari più bassi per i
nuovi dipendenti e ridotto i premi di fine anno. - A fine anni ’70 “la mia società di consulenza venne ingaggiata
da Nissan per consulenza su quello che divenne il secondo stabilimento auto jap
in USA”. Nissan propendeva per riprodurre la situazione jap, con sindacati
aziendali con legami molto tenui con le confederazioni, e lavoratori con una profonda
lealtà nei confronti dell’azienda e orgoglio aziendale. - “Dicemmo a Nissan che in USA
sindacati aziendali autonomi erano una rarità, e tendevano ad essere assorbite
dalle forti federazioni nazionali: la sua scelta era tra UAW e nessun
sindacato. Producemmo un dossier di documentazione, sottolieando il carattere
progressista del sindacato e la sua assenza di corruzione, ma anche l’impegno
ad un trattamento identico di tutte le case auto. - La dirigenza Nissan soppesò la
sua tradizione di trattare con un’organizzazione dei lavoratori contro la
probabilità che UAW l’avrebbe costretta a pratiche identiche a quelle di GM,
Ford e Chrysler: Nissan scelse di respingere le offerte UAW di sindacalizzare
Smyrna e inviò in Jap per addestramento quasi 400 dei suoi primi dipendenti. - Prese anche misure simboliche:
tutti i dipendenti, fino ai massimi dirigenti, portavano uniformi identiche.
Tutti i lavoratori in produzione erano autorizzati a fermare la catena di
montaggio se percepivano un problema di qualità. Non vi erano parcheggi né
mense per dirigenti. Smyrna divenne lo stabilimento auto a più alta
produttività degli Stati Uniti, con il più elevato standard di qualità, e lo
rimane. - UAW ha fallito tre campagne di
sindacalizzazione a Smyrna. Nessun successivo stabilimento auto a controllo
asiatico è più stato sindacalizzato. - Tesi che l’intransigenza UAW
porta alla riduzione delle case auto e alla eliminazione di posti lavoro.
By JOHN B. SCHNAPP
January 25, 2006; Page A12
General Motors and Ford, bleeding cash and
market share, have vowed to cut 60,000 jobs over the next half-dozen years.
So far, though, they have been unable to request, much less obtain, more than
token economic first-aid from the United Automobile Workers. A recent modest
health-care "give-up" proposal at Ford provoked angry union militants
to accuse their president, Ron Gettlefinger, of rank appeasement and was
endorsed by a vote of only 51% to 49%. Ford’s announcement of its "Way
Forward" downsizing has led UAW leaders to grouse that both auto makers should
be mobilizing to increase sales rather than engaging in brutal cutbacks.
The collective bargaining negotiations
upcoming in 2007 loom as a likely auto industry Armageddon, in stark
contrast to a rising trend among similarly threatened industries in Germany,
where unions are quietly customizing deals to protect jobs and preserve
employers. The evident unwillingness of the UAW rank-and-file to
participate in that sort of salvation effort is a legacy of the union’s justly
admired founder, Walter Reuther, an inheritance likely to
prove now progressively more obsolete and self-defeating.
* * *
Reuther (1907-1970) was an old-fashioned
American lefty, a breed now long extinct. Growing up in the household of an
ardently Socialist immigrant father, he and his dad in 1917 visited party
leader Eugene Debs during his controversial incarceration for opposition to
American involvement in World War I. It made a lasting impression.
Reuther became a tool-and-die maker at
Ford, the pinnacle of auto worker technical achievements. In the midst of the Great Depression, Walter and his brother
Victor worked for two years at the Gorky automobile factory in the USSR,
designed by Ford for the Stalin regime. The experience left Reuther with a firm
antipathy toward communism and communist labor factions in the U.S. He
believed that they cynically subordinated worker interest to political
ambition.
On his return, he became active in the
infant UAW and on May 26, 1937, became engraved into the national
conscience. He and other UAW leaders, engaged in a leafleting effort at the
Miller Road gate of Ford’s River Rouge complex, were confronted by
club-wielding thugs led by Henry Ford’s confidante, ex-boxer Harry Bennett.
The resulting "Battle of the Overpass" and its one-sided bloodletting,
photographed by Scotty Kilpatrick of the Detroit News and widely circulated in
Life, Time and other outlets, shocked the country.
Inevitably, the persistent worker
"sitdown" occupations of their plants, combined with pressure from
the Roosevelt administration’s National Labor Relations Board, led to the
unionization of all American auto makers. In 1946, Reuther was elected
president of the UAW after a longstanding struggle against a faction led by
Homer Martin, George Addes and Richard Frankensteen, which was considered —
probably accurately — as Communist. It was almost surely an outgrowth of
this intramural conflict that prompted a 1948 shotgun blast through
Reuther’s kitchen window, which left his right arm permanently damaged.
As leader of his union, Reuther was a
stubborn and tactically brilliant negotiator. He repeatedly challenged the
auto makers to prove that they were economically unable to meet his demands,
and invented the concept of a "target company." For each
collective bargaining cycle, the UAW selected one auto maker for negotiation:
It might be the weakest and most vulnerable to a strike threat, or the
strongest and most able to provide a generous settlement. The contract hammered
out with the target company became the "pattern" applied to everyone
else. In 1948, Reuther also invented the linking of worker compensation to
inflation through an automatic cost-of-living (COLA) escalator.
Walter Reuther created the foundation of
the entire panoply of worker benefits that now contribute to the overall cost
sclerosis at GM and Ford. But the aspect of his legacy that currently
weighs most heavily on the future of these auto makers was philosophic.
First was the cultivation among UAW
members of a primary attachment to the union rather than to their employers.
The employer was an adversary to be confronted rather than an ally to which
workers owed loyalty and support.
Second was Reuther’s belief that the UAW
should never allow itself to influence competition among auto makers by
differentiating contract terms. Wages, hours, benefits and work rules were to
be identical. Even as the weakest companies — Studebaker, Hudson, Packard —
foundered in the ’40s and ’50s, Reuther’s UAW made little effort to throw
them a life preserver. Indeed, there was little reason to do so since overall
industry growth in that period readily absorbed displaced UAW members.
Reuther died in 1970, and it was only a decade later, with Chrysler teetering on the
edge of insolvency, did then-UAW President Douglas Fraser allow that company
some relief from the established-pattern terms. This gesture and his
accession to Chrysler’s board of directors, together with a modest federal loan
guarantee and Lee Iacocca’s inspired managerial improvisation, saved the
company. But Mr. Fraser’s actions came late in the Chrysler crisis and it
was all a close-run thing.
Walter Reuther could not have foreseen the
competitive world that Doug Fraser faced, much less today’s. In the year of
his death, American companies still held 87% of the U.S. market. Only
Volkswagen, among offshore auto makers, sold as many as half a million vehicles
here. Toyota and Datsun jointly accounted for about a quarter million and the
coming of Honda was still five years in the future. Indeed the big story in
1970 was a three-month UAW strike at GM, which cost that company more than a
million units of production.
The habit of confrontation established by
Reuther, though, deeply impedes the willingness of his union to seek
creative quid pro quos that might help GM and Ford avoid bankruptcies —
bankruptcies that would undermine their credibility among potential customers
and lead to likely voiding of collective bargaining agreements. Throughout
Germany, in contrast, unions affiliated with the IG Metall confederation
— many of them in the auto-parts sector — have quietly been making the
company-specific deals with employers that Reuther abhorred, in order to
prevent the shifting of production to lower-wage venues and to guarantee job
security. The German unions’ most frequent concessions have given
employers greater control over work hours, extended the work day without
additional compensation, applied lower wages to new employees and reduced
year-end bonuses.
The UAW, instead, seems to be falling into a
policy of angry negativism. GM and Ford, despite the intensity of their
problems, are viewed as still-rich enterprises afflicted with managerial
ineptness who will just have to figure things out for themselves. It
remains an "us versus them" kind of world at Solidarity House, the
UAW’s Detroit headquarters. By refusing to become involved in solutions to the
auto makers’ problems, as Doug Fraser found it desirable to do 25 years ago,
the UAW makes itself into an increasingly prominent part of those problems.
* * *
In the late ’70s, I figured in a singular
reflection of the consequences to the UAW, both then and now, of the Reuther
philosophy. My consulting firm was engaged by Nissan to advise it
on key issues related to the establishment of what became the second Japanese-owned
auto assembly plant in the U.S. One of them was labor relations.
Nissan was predisposed toward replicating its
situation in Japan, where it has a company union which, in turn, maintains
ties to a relatively weak national federation. Despite traditional
theatrics around annual wage negotiations, Nissan’s Japanese workers are
deeply loyal to the company and proud of their affiliation with it.
We told Nissan that autonomous
company-specific unions were a rarity in the U.S. and tended to be absorbed by
strong national federations. Its real choice, then, was between the UAW and no
union at all. We wrote a briefing book on the history of the UAW, striving
to make it unbiased. We stressed the union’s social progressiveness and its
lack of corruption. But we also stressed its commitment, stemming from Reuther,
to identical treatment of all auto makers.
The Nissan management struggled with this,
weighing its traditional attachment to dealing with a workers’ organization
against the likelihood that the UAW would force it into work practices
identical to those of GM or Ford or Chrysler. This
was not at all what it had in mind. It prompted a painful decision, one that
went deeply against the grain, but Nissan chose to reject UAW overtures to
unionize its new Smyrna, Tenn., plant. It sent nearly 400 of its initial work
force for training in Japan, most of them at a twin plant in Kyushu to
learn its ways alongside Japanese counterparts on Kyushu’s production line.
Many of these Tennesseans had never been farther from home than Nashville.
Nissan adopted also a number of important
symbolic gestures. All employees, including top executives, wore identical work
uniforms. Production workers were empowered to stop the assembly line if they
perceived any problem affecting quality. There were no reserved parking spaces
nor was there an executive dining room. Smyrna quickly became the most
productive auto plant in the U.S., with the highest level of objectively
measured product quality, an eminence it continues to enjoy.
Three separate UAW organizing efforts have
all foundered at Smyrna. No later Asian auto maker plant unaffiliated with the
Big Three has ever been organized either.
Walter Reuther was an undoubted great man.
However, the persistence in the contemporary UAW of his intractability,
understandable though it may have been in his own time, ensures a continuation
of the worst of all outcomes — a shrinkage of employers and the disappearance
of jobs.
Mr. Schnapp led the auto industry practice at
Mercer Management Consulting and had a longstanding column on the industry in
the Detroit News.