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‘He Lied’: Trump Blows Up After Ohio GM Plant Shuts Down

‘He Lied’: Trump Blows Up After Ohio GM Plant Shuts Down

On the campaign trail, Trump promised voters in Ohio and throughout the midwest that he would save manufacturing jobs. But it turns out that was just another broken promise by a boastful liar.

Instead, an embarrassed Trump melted down this weekend in reaction to a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that recently stopped production.

Trump tweeted Saturday, “Because the economy is so good, General Motors must get their Lordstown, Ohio, plant open, maybe in a different form or with a new owner, FAST!” “G.M. MUST ACT QUICKLY. Time is of the essence!”

The next day, Trump decided to blame union workers — falsely — for GM’s decision to shutter the plant, going so far as to call out the president of the local union by name.

“Democrat UAW Local 1112 President David Green ought to get his act together and produce. G.M. let our Country down, but other much better car companies are coming into the U.S. in droves. I want action on Lordstown fast. Stop complaining and get the job done! 3.8% Unemployment!” Trump wrote.

Trump’s meltdown comes months after GM initially announced, in November 2018, that it would close five North American plants, including the one in Lordstown. At the time, GM noted that Trump’s disastrous trade wars cost the company more than $1 billion. Between the five plants, GM said almost 15,000 workers would lose their jobs.

In early March, the final car — a Chevy Cruze — rolled off the Lordstown assembly line.

On Monday morning, GM made clear to Trump that they were, in fact, working closely with the union when making decisions about which plants to close. But an angry, and perhaps humiliated, Trump was apparently looking for someone to blame in light of his broken campaign pledges.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly told workers in Ohio that he would single-handedly save manufacturing in the region. Trump promised to make Ohio a “manufacturing behemoth,” saying companies would flood the region with manufacturing plants and provide jobs.

Even after he was in office, he kept making the same boasts. “I was looking at some of those big, once-incredible job-producing factories…Those jobs have left Ohio,” Trump said in Youngstown, Ohio in July 2017. “They’re all coming back. They’re all coming back. Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he advised people.

GM’s announcement to shutter five plants came a year after those comments, and Ohio workers know who’s to blame.

Nanette Senters worked in the Lordstown plant. After news broke that the plant would close, she organized a letter-writing campaign to Trump, asking for him to help. As of early February, she never heard from him. “He lied,” Senters said of Trump. “He doesn’t care.”

Yet Trump absolutely refuses to accept responsibility for either his broken promise, or the fact that his failed trade war played a role in the massive layoffs and plant closures.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: A worker installs parts onto the dashboard for the Chevrolet Cruze car as it moves along the assembly line at the General Motors Cruze assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio July 22, 2011. REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk 

Unions See A Comeback Coming As Wages Stall, Rich Get Richer

Unions See A Comeback Coming As Wages Stall, Rich Get Richer

By Keith Naughton, Lynn Doan and Jeff Green, Bloomberg News (TNS)

After years of avoiding confrontation, the U.S. labor movement is reasserting itself. From the ports of Los Angeles to the car plants of Detroit, unions are demanding payback for sacrifices they say helped revive the economy.

Oil workers have walked off the job for higher wages and better working conditions. Dock workers have snarled West Coast ports. Personnel staffing oil terminals at the Port of Long Beach in California are threatening to strike. In Detroit, union leaders preparing for contract talks this year will push for the first raise for veteran autoworkers in a decade.

Union leaders are taking advantage of a tightening labor market and favorable political environment. With middle-class wages stagnating and the rich getting richer, income inequality has become a rallying cry for Democrats and Republicans alike. Reviving opportunity for all resonates with Americans who feel left out as growth picks up and the stock market reaches record highs.

“Employers seem to think that they can push unions, the roots of the American working class, off a cliff,” said Dave Campbell, whose union local represents oil-terminal workers at the Port of Long Beach. “Well, these corporations have made a significant miscalculation in our ability to fight back. There’s a lot of labor strife now, and they could have a major confrontation on their hands.”

Campbell’s combative rhetoric evokes an era when unions had the clout to win significant lifestyle upgrades for their members. Wielding the threat of strikes and work slowdowns, organized labor helped generations of Americans join the middle class and stay there.

In recent years, however, globalization and weak economic growth have cut power. In 1979, 21 million American workers belonged to unions. By last year, 14.6 million did. In the 1980s, strikes averaged 75 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last year, there were 11.

Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has long watched the ebbing of union power and wondered if walkouts were an endangered species. The surge in labor unrest has caught his attention.

Shaiken says the main catalyst is inequality, considered the defining economic challenge of this era by such divergent figures as President Barack Obama to Republican presidential aspirant Jeb Bush. On Thursday, Wal-Mart Stores, America’s largest private employer, said it would raise wages to $9 an hour, well above the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The move, by a retailer that has thwarted unions trying to organize its stores, strikes back at critics who say it underpays employees.

A 2011 study drew a link between the decline in union membership since 1973 and expanding wage disparity. Those trends have since continued, said Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Harvard University who co-authored the study.

Union workers say they took a hit on wages and benefits after the financial crisis to help keep companies and the economy afloat and expect to be rewarded for their sacrifice.

“You don’t want to be the senior partner in failure and the junior partner in success,” said Gary Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Since 2009, management compensation has increases about 50 percent faster than union workers’ income. In the auto industry, real wages have declined 24 percent since 2003, according to the Center for Automotive Research.

Pat Patterson, 60, is on strike for the first time in 35 years working as a pipefitter at Tesoro Corp.’s refinery in Carson, Calif. Patterson said his union helped the company survive the recession and now should share the wealth it has since accumulated.

“Their whole driver is greed,” he said. “Tesoro is making record profits. There’s more profit, and they don’t want to share it with the workers.”

In an e-mail, Tina Barbee, a Tesoro spokeswoman, said “it’s very unfortunate that the union has called out on strike so many of its members –– our employees –– who will not be able to share in all of the rewards.”

In Detroit, Dennis Williams, the United Autoworkers’ new president, has made getting his members a raise a top priority in contract talks with General Motors, Ford Motor and FCA US, formerly known as Chrysler Group.

And he’s not above rattling the strike saber. Williams stressed the importance of the right to strike. During the last contract talks, in 2011, the UAW gave up that right at GM and Chrysler to help the automakers recover from their bankruptcies. Now, that power has been restored. The current four-year auto contract expires Sept. 15.

The auto companies are loath to increase their labor costs since that’s what helped nearly drive them out of business. They prefer to reward workers with profit-sharing checks that can shrink or disappear in tough times. Detroit autoworkers have received record profit sharing for the past five years.

But Detroit’s automakers may have to increase wages, said Art Schwartz, a former GM labor negotiator who now runs Labor & Economics Associates, a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, Mich.

If the UAW wins traditional wage increases, “that will embolden other unions to try and get more,” Schwartz said.

The United Steelworkers, which represents oil refinery workers, is seeking better wages, benefits and restrictions on the use of nonunion contract workers. The companies are expected to use the worldwide collapse in crude-oil prices as a cudgel in negotiations, but the unions may dig in. When oil workers across the country last walked off the job, 35 years ago, the strike lasted three months.

One of the challenges for labor leaders is overcoming a perception among Americans rich and poor that union workers are overpaid and protected even if they perform poorly.

The Pacific Maritime Association, which represents port employers, says dock workers make $147,000 a year. Craig Merrilees, a spokesman for the longshore union, calls the calculation “demonstrably false” and says workers earn about $80,000 a year and can reach the higher wage only by working maximum overtime on weekends and holidays.
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(James Nash contributed to this report.)

Photo: maisa_nyc via Flickr

UAW’s Volkswagen Case Heads To NLRB Hearing As Politicians Object

UAW’s Volkswagen Case Heads To NLRB Hearing As Politicians Object

By Paresh Dave, Los Angeles Times

A contentious effort to unionize a foreign brand’s automobile factory is scheduled to reach a courtroom Monday, and the case appears far from resolution.

A U.S. senator, the Tennessee governor and several state lawmakers are fighting subpoenas served by the United Automobile Workers union ordering them to appear in court with documents related to the failed vote at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The UAW alleges that the conservative politicians intimidated workers at the plant, leading a 53 percent majority to vote in February against becoming a union shop. The union lost even though Volkswagen remained neutral. The German automaker supports unions at all of its other major factories.

The union wants to stage a new vote. It views the situation as an important test case to figure out how to rebuild its slipping membership with workers from the historically anti-union South, where several carmakers have set up shop in the last decade or so.

The lawmakers have sought to ensure the state’s business-friendly image is preserved. They have rejected the claim that what they said this winter amounted to threats.

An administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board was scheduled to begin hearing the UAW’s appeal Monday at the Hamilton County Courthouse. But whether the judge will enforce the subpoenas or even start the hearing as planned remains unclear.

The results of the battle could affect a decision expected soon on whether Volkswagen starts producing a second vehicle in Tennessee. The UAW alleges that state lawmakers threatened to pull subsidies for Volkswagen if the factory became unionized. Workers feared job cuts and rejected the opportunity to join the union, the UAW has argued.

“The taxpayers of Tennessee reached out to Volkswagen and welcomed them to our state and our community,” House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick, a Republican from Chattanooga, said in one of the controversial remarks. “We are glad they are here. But that is not a green light to help force a union into the workplace. That was not part of the deal.”

McCormick was one of at least 10 state officials, including Gov. Bill Haslam, to be issued subpoenas. Writing for the group, Atty. Gen. Robert Cooper Jr. called the summons overly broad, abusive and disruptive.

In a legal filing seeking to have the subpoenas dismissed, he wrote that they “are far beyond what is necessary or appropriate for the union to obtain evidence to support its objections.”

If not revoked by the NLRB, the orders will “chill legitimate public debate, effectively silence any opposing views, and distract the NLRB from the fact that the union lost an election it controlled in virtually every facet, except the result,” the attorney general wrote.

Haslam told reporters last week that he wouldn’t show up to court Monday. U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), said he would be in Ukraine and Moldova, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported.

Corker’s chief of staff, Todd Womack, told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday: “Everyone understands that after a clear defeat, the UAW is trying to create a sideshow, so we have filed a motion to revoke these baseless subpoenas. Neither Sen. Corker nor his staff will attend the hearing on Monday.”

The UAW already lost an early round in the case, when an NLRB appeals panel said it would uphold an order allowing anti-union employees at the plant to be involved in the case alongside attorneys from a national right-to-work group.

The National Right to Work Foundation has said it was shameful that the UAW was trying to silence the voices of affected workers.

The anti-union workers said they wanted to intervene because they believed Volkswagen wouldn’t adequately represent their concerns in front of the NLRB.

The UAW countered that it was trying to keep out “groups with shadowy funding that are masquerading as legitimate worker representatives.”

AFP Photo/Patrik Stollarz

Where Do American Unions Go From Chattanooga?

Where Do American Unions Go From Chattanooga?

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) — I asked Rich Yeselson, a former union strategist and author of this excellent article on the United Automobile Workers’ failed effort to unionize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to answer a few questions, via email, about the meaning of the Chattanooga vote and the future of unionism in the U.S. Here is a lightly edited transcript.

Question: Who lost in Chattanooga last week? The UAW? Volkswagen? The plant workers?

Answer: The UAW was clearly the big loser. Its long-term project to break through at a foreign automaker’s Southern plant failed again — this time with a carefully wrought strategy and the company, effectively, on its side. Victories in social struggle signify competence and power; failure their opposite. So this makes every other organizing campaign that much tougher. The Chattanooga plant is an anomaly for VW, but it will be fine. As for the workers, a union (and the works council that would have come with it) would have given them a collective voice in the workplace on every major issue. But the majority voted no– we’ll see if they later regret that vote.

Q: Did workers at the plant conclude that the union is so weak in this economy that joining it can’t provide real benefits? If so, is that perception correct?

A: We don’t know that for certain yet, but some anecdotal post-vote evidence seems to indicate that a lot of the “no” voters didn’t think the UAW had much juice anyway, so why join them? The workers saw the two-tier wage structure — with starting wages in Detroit now similar to non-union starting wages in the South — that the UAW accepted at the Big Three auto companies after the recession. They saw the UAW’s obvious eagerness to project a tone of cooperation with VW, rather than hint at any productive antagonism.

Capital mobility obviously weakens labor’s economic leverage in the manufacturing sector, where facilities can be moved to lower-wage countries. (That’s why the German and Japanese companies moved to the low-wage South in the first place.) The paradox, however, is that if workers reject the UAW because of its perceived weakness, then the UAW might disappear altogether. If it does, the transplant companies in the South will feel no obligation to sustain wages and benefits, which are comparable to the union rate precisely in order to keep unions out. So the vulnerability of the union could become the vulnerability of the workers who disdain the union, too.

Q: Is it right to view this as another landmark on a long, hard road to irrelevance? Or do you see anything positive for the UAW or unions in general to extract from this?

A: It’s trite to say, but history really is unknowable — we can declare something a defeat, but we can’t yet know if it’s a landmark. In the early 1930s, John L. Lewis was beset by enemies within the mineworkers union, and was being booed and insulted by his own membership when he tried to speak. By 1937, he was on the cover of Time magazine, the leader of a massive and growing labor movement and the second most powerful person in the country.

The UAW and labor, broadly, can relearn one important lesson from this defeat: Working people, through the institutions of unions, can potentially still throw a lot of economic, political and cultural weight around. And that worries economic and political elites. The almost hysterical conservative leadership of Tennessee, including U.S. Senator Bob Corker, fears the power of unions. If unions were truly “irrelevant” there wouldn’t have been so much anxiety coursing through the low-wage South that the UAW might win, and that a win might lead to other wins. But the workers have to want to unionize, even if they are being intimidated. Otherwise Corker will rest easy.

Q: We have a chronically slack labor market, stagnant and declining wages for workers who aren’t at the top of the income scale and the continuing effects of technology and a global labor market keeping those wages down. Do you see a path out of this to better days and better wages? How?

A: There are public policies we could implement if we didn’t have such a dysfunctional system of government, and if one of our major parties wasn’t the most radical political formation since the Southern Democrats before the Civil War.

We’ve over-corrected for inflation. Former president Ronald Reagan and Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker were cheered for “slaying” high inflation by getting it down to 4 percent. Now we’ve cut that in half, which crimps investment that can lead to more jobs. Europe has shown the folly of imagining growth happens via austerity and inflation fetishism.

A tighter labor market equals higher wages. Obviously we could increase workers’ bargaining power via support for unionization, too. And we could lift the wage floor with a combination of wage subsidies and a higher minimum wage, which would have a ripple effect upward on higher wage scales, too. These are technical fixes that policy wonks understand. We can also generate a lot more economic expansion and lower housing costs in our great cities — where most of our growth takes place — by loosening zoning restrictions. Lane Kenworthy has a lot of great ideas in his new book, Social Democratic America. But they won’t happen until the structure of our political system changes, or there is a decisive transformation of the Republican Party.

Q: One last (admittedly impossible) question: In 15 years, will the number of private-sector union members be smaller or larger than now? Why?

A: You’re right — it’s an impossible question! I don’t know the answer. Nobody remotely could have imagined the union growth in the 15 years from 1927 to 1942, when the percentage of unionized workers in the U.S. more than tripled. Incremental growth in union membership pretty much never happens. In the U.S. and other western nations. Union membership tends to stagnate and decline for decades; then, occasionally, it experiences enormous growth spurts. So the historical and economic logic suggests that workers, en masse, have to become sufficiently angry at their situation to demand massive change, via increased unionization. If workers don’t do that, then further decline is likely.

(Francis Wilkinson is a member of the Bloomberg View editorial board. Follow him on Twitter. Rich Yeselson, a writer in Washington, D.C., worked for 23 years as a union strategic campaigner with the AFL-CIO, SEIU, UNITE-HERE and Change to Win. Follow him on Twitter.)

Photo: David Shankbone via Flickr