On the picket line at San Leandro Ford |
by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
The strike at the Ford dealership by members of the Machinists union local 1546 has taken a familiar turn; it has been called off and a so-called 30-day cooling off period has been put in its place according to workers I have spoken to. I commented on this in an earlier blog. This is a familiar game the bosses and the labor leadership play. We saw it in the recent BART dispute.
The strike at the Ford dealership by members of the Machinists union local 1546 has taken a familiar turn; it has been called off and a so-called 30-day cooling off period has been put in its place according to workers I have spoken to. I commented on this in an earlier blog. This is a familiar game the bosses and the labor leadership play. We saw it in the recent BART dispute.
Were the labor leadership, willing and prepared to fight, not
simply of the unions involved in these struggles but of the entire labor
movement, we would be hearing about “heating up” periods not cooling off
periods. Workers are angry at the attacks on our living standards and have
every right to be heated up; it is not the job of the labor leaders to cool us
down. The “cooling off” period is nothing but a strikebreaking tool.
Does anyone with any brains at all think the workers at San Leandro Ford will
walk of the job this Christmas?
This is a familiar pattern. We saw it with BART.
What happened in both these situations is this. Bosses,whether at BART or an auto dealership, are relentless in their
efforts to drive down wages and conditions. The Union leadership and their army
of staffers and lawyers would willingly capitulate if the bosses would simply demand
a little less. But this is a different time. They are on the offensive; they
are out to take everything they can and the labor leadership, which sees
themselves as part of the system, will not fight.
The labor hierarchy is caught between the attacks of
the bosses’ who are relentless in their assault, and the pressure from within
their own ranks to stem the blood flow after years of concessions and
givebacks. The BART union officials made it clear long before the first
strike that they would go away if the bosses’ would be less demanding. But they refused. At the same time the union
membership did not want to make concessions. So rather than admit they
would not fight to win, labor leaders took their members out on a strike with
no strategy to win it. This is what the so-called cooling off period was, and
is about.
The “cooling off” period is an increasingly used
strikebreaking tool; it should be called the “make concessions and get the workers back to work tool.” It’s
almost certain that the workers at the Ford dealership will end up back
at work as a federal mediator has been called in, most likely at the request of
the movers and shakers atop the Machinists union in agreement with the bosses.
The workers will have lost a few weeks pay and be back
at work and the boss will end up with a concessionary deal. Union staffers and
higher ups don’t lose wages when they take their members out on strike knowing
they have no strategy for victory. It suits their general view of the
world----the members will be demoralized a little more, will lose faith in the
union, will stay out of their hair and life can go on; another defeat from what
could have been a victory. It will be the rank and file that will be blamed for the defeat of course.
I was told by one worker at the Ford dealership that a union
official had tried to talk them out of striking but couldn’t. The cooling
off period is a boon for the union tops; they know no worker will want to go
back out again at Christmas. Their compliance in this strikebreaking
method is criminal, but they don’t have to work under the wages and conditions
that their concessionary deals with the bosses impose on their members.
The boss in this particular instance is Bob Knezevich. Bob
has a nice 6,600 sq. foot 5 bedroom, 5-bath property in Redwood City that sits
on a nice 20,000 sq foot lot. It’s
worth around $1.8 million according to reports I’ve read.
Bob made sure that contract negotiations included issues
designed to divide the workers. In the parts dept. Knezevich wanted to
lower the pay from $28 to $20 an hour and compensate the workers for their loss
with a commission plan. After the strike Knezevich offered a wage increase of
30c an hour over three years for these guys. The blue-collar mechanics
backed up their co-workers in sales refusing to allow the boss to divide them.
The mechanics on the other hand are paid a flat rate per
job, a form of piecework. San Leandro Ford is not set up for this type of
procedure one worker told me but piece-work is also nasty as it causes workers
to work faster which is divisive as we all work at different paces. It is also
discriminatory toward older workers. There was a general attempt to turn
workers in each dept. against each other, mechanics, lube guys, techs, parts
etc. Incidentally another issue a striker complained about what that the union was not very clear about developments at the table as the strike wore on. This is nothing new.
The labor officialdom blames members for not being active in
their unions, but their whole strategy is designed to demoralize the members
and convince us that we cannot win, that we are too weak. Why would we go to a
union meeting to hear the same argument from our leaders that we hear form the
boss? You can’t get people active around a program of concessions and that’s
exactly the intention.
Bob Knezevich lives, or at least has property at 18 Colton
Court in Redwood City, maybe a 40-minute drive away. One strategy would
be to picket his home, leaflet his neighborhood. If the union leadership
had any intention of fighting at all they should organize to do this and
leaflet where he shops where he goes to church or where his kids or grandkids
go to school. A campaign for solidarity action should be taken to all the other Ford plants and outlets. The battle should be taken to Ford, to the owners of
the Ford dealerships and to all the bosses’, their lives should be disrupted.
Such a campaign can also be used to organize the non-union dealerships. A
campaign like this could also lead to fighting opposition caucuses in our
unions that can change the present direction.
These methods do not have to involve illegal activity, it is
our 1st Amendment right to gather, inform, take the battle to them
and their private lives as long as we don’t threaten or invade private property.
Defiance of the law can occur when we have the numbers, that’s how the trade
union movement was built.
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