Some transferred to Bay City about 50 miles north of here to take those jobs. “They have been TEMPS now for ALMOST TWO YEARS and if they wanted to be Permanent Workers again given the OPPORTUNITY to do that if they transferred to plants outside the Flint area. A GM worker in Flint posted a comment, stating: “(A) LOT of people were Permanently LAID OFF people from our plant GM Flint Metal Center then given the OPPORTUNITY to be Temp workers at half the price next door at Flint Truck Plant. Workers responding on Facebook to the reports of GM’s hiring difficulties expressed no surprise, given the brutal treatment of temps. “It’s nonsense to have people working side by side and some of them getting different pay rates. “I think it’s BS,” a GM Flint truck worker told the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter when asked about the company’s scramble to hire temporary workers.
#DETROIT FREE PRESS GM CONTRACT FREE#
As Fort Wayne Assembly shop chairman LeTourneau told the Free Press, “Pizza Hut is paying $20/hour to deliver pizza here.” With the assistance of the UAW, General Motors and the other auto companies have slashed the pay of thousands of autoworkers to the point where it is comparable to or even less than that of fast-food workers. (This “problem” for the corporations is precisely why both big business parties are denouncing the meager $300-a-week federal supplement as a “disincentive” to work and have begun winding up the program, first in Republican-controlled states and nationwide by September 6). Under the federal pandemic unemployment supplement, US workers have been receiving almost as much in unemployment benefits as GM pays its temps, while saving on transportation and child care and avoiding working in crowded and unsafe factories. GM’s difficulty hiring is not hard to understand. “We’ll do the job fair and we’ll take it from there,” he added, “but we’re not going to stop until we get enough workers to take care of it. Welter was referring to the fact that temporary workers are used to fill in for full-time workers who are on vacation. Nobody wants to come to work here.”Įric Welter, UAW Local 598 shop chairman at the Flint truck plant, said, “GM needs these trucks and I won’t continue running a schedule that doesn’t support my workers and they don’t want to do that either.” UAW Local 2209 shop chairman Rich LeTourneau at Fort Wayne Assembly summed up the problem as follows: “We’re looking to hire temps like crazy, we just can’t get them. Rather than solidarizing themselves with the needs of workers, UAW officials interviewed by the Free Press spoke unabashedly as cheap-labor contractors, identifying with GM and offering friendly advice as to how “we” (the UAW and GM) can overcome the labor shortage. The reaction of the UAW to the shortage of workers willing to work for starvation wages is highly instructive.
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Over the past 15 years the “union” has imposed multi-tier wage and benefit systems to divide the workers and create a super-exploited, “flexible” workforce. That such conditions prevail is an indictment of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which for decades has functioned as an adjunct of the auto companies, imposing endless concessions and suppressing workers’ opposition to layoffs and wage cuts in order to boost the profits and personal wealth of the auto bosses and Wall Street. They have no contract rights and can be fired for petty infractions. They labor under irregular schedules on jobs that are physically demanding and carry the risk of exposure to the deadly coronavirus.
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Temporary workers earn a miserable $16.67 an hour with no benefits. GM World Headquartesr in Detroit, Michigan (Source: Flickr/Ray Dumas)