Union workers at DCX plant use teamwork, education to keep their slice of American Dream.
DUNDEE -- A new United Auto Workers union is rising in the fields of southern Michigan, 60 miles from Detroit and nearly a lifetime removed from the confrontational culture that shaped the union's relationship with Detroit's automakers.
The few hundred workers at DaimlerChrysler AG's Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance earn Big Three wages and benefits, but that's where similarities to their brothers and sisters around the country end.
Each hourly worker has either a two-year associate's degree or a skilled journeyman's card. They work in Japanese-style teams. They prize cooperation over conflict and the "it's-not-my-job" attitude.
"We can work at the same pace they can work and not give up the American dream -- the boat, the second home," says Don Kingery, 54, a team leader who spent 33 years as a UAW member inside Ford Motor Co.'s Rouge complex before retiring. "We've just got to think differently."
A lot differently.
As much as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. need to craft a new business model for their second century, so does a UAW shackled by precedent, tradition and entitlement. The days when the union's pattern contract with Detroit's automakers set industry labor rates and ignored the foreign competition are gone, replaced by competitive intensity that threatens to exhaust the companies and their union.
"It's a terrible thing to waste a crisis," says Sean McAlinden, chief economist of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor and a leading expert on the UAW. "It's time to change.
"A new labor model? Absolutely, or this union becomes like a hood ornament."
It doesn't have to if more local UAW leaders around the country get serious about emulating examples being set in places like Lansing, Toledo and, especially, the new four-cylinder engine plant in Dundee. There you'll find a glimpse of what the UAW's future could be -- high pay for high skill, post-high school education, flexibility and recognition of a new world order.
To read the daily headlines and the repeated lamentations that the "legacy costs" of pensions and retiree health care are killing Detroit's automakers is to conclude that "the union" is all that ails Detroit. But it isn't -- not even close. There are cars and trucks that don't sell; marketing campaigns that miss the mark; ill-conceived ventures that burn cash and distract management.
No, for all the inefficiencies and added cost that the UAW and its contract adds to Detroit but not Detroit's competitors, there's encouraging evidence that more union locals aren't waiting for Solidarity House to become part of the solution. Why? Because most union politics are local, and they understand that denying a changing world won't make it go away.
"You're either on the tracks or on the train," Bruce Baumhower, president of UAW Local 12 in Toledo, told me. "The Japanese have been eating our lunch for the last decade. And here come the Koreans, and they're kicking our butts. And guess what: Here comes the Chinese. That gets my attention. You can either sit down and bitch about it, or you can control your destiny."
Which for Baumhower meant cutting a deal with DaimlerChrysler that is revolutionary for a UAW-represented plant in a solidly UAW town not known for breeding patsies. This is the same UAW local that years ago loaded unpainted Jeep bodies on rail cars and installed seats backward to send its message of discontent to management.
A new Jeep plant, being built hard by DaimlerChrysler's Toledo North plant along Interstate 75, will -- for the first time -- have independent nonunion suppliers running the plant's chassis line, body shop and paint shop with their own employees.
"I would expect those guys would unionize," Baumhower says, acknowledging that most of the would-be suppliers don't have union work forces. "You're right, there's no history of labor unions" at those suppliers.
So why break with decades of precedent, I asked Baumhower, and effectively welcome competition onto turf that historically belongs to the UAW?
"We want the work here in Toledo. You've got to have the jobs before you have unions -- it's not the other way around."
Smart guy. The way Baumhower figures it, the so-called "Toledo South" plant scheduled to build the next-generation Jeep Wrangler will create roughly 1,250 jobs for the Toledo economy -- between 200 and 300 new UAW-represented jobs and hundreds more that could be.
And if he gets his way, Chrysler President Tom LaSorda will acknowledge the growing chunk of Jeep production in Toledo and move ahead with building a much larger "supplier park" next to his growing Toledo complex, creating still more jobs in Northwest Ohio.
Like I said, Baumhower's a smart guy.
Those are jobs that aren't heading down South, over to China or southwest to Mexico. They're potential union members paying dues and taxes, and they're proof that Detroit's automakers can and will invest in Rust Belt communities that embrace the new reality enveloping the U.S. auto industry.
Then there's Dundee, a joint venture between DaimlerChrysler, Mitsubishi Motors Corp. of Japan and Hyundai Motor Co. of South Korea. Shorn of the onerous work rules whose principal purpose became the padding of union rolls, GEMA's 254 hourly workers -- only 110 are working so far, with the rest to come later -- are trained to do more than one job.
They're paid $30 an hour to work four 10-hour shifts each week in just one job classification. They don't get overtime. They work 49 fewer days per year than the average UAW-Big Three member. Union seniority doesn't entitle them to work only the day shift or perform only the less strenuous tasks. Everybody rotates everything.
"I see something here that's going to work," says Kingery, who headed the union bargaining committee that crafted the agreement between UAW Local 723 and GEMA. As team leader on the engine block line, he also sees a different world.
"Traditionally 30 people run a block line," he says. "I have seven -- and that's technology. It's not taking the food out of anyone's mouth or the company making too much money and not spreading it around."
GEMA's truly revolutionary, however, because it uses outside suppliers -- many, but not all, of them unionized -- to supply 45 different business services to the plant. Building and machine maintenance are outsourced. There is no dynamometer to test engines, as in most engine plants; that's done by Roush Racing in Livonia. Materials handling and logistics are outsourced.
"We want to focus on one thing -- building the highest quality, low-cost engines in the world," says Bruce Coventry, president of GEMA. "The whole (UAW) leadership -- they get it, they understand it. They've been aggressive. They've been open to new ideas."
They should, because the old ones don't apply anymore.
