Statement of Three Former UAW Executive Board Members on UAW Tentative Agreement
The
following is the Statement on the GM-UAW Tentative Agreement from Paul Schrade, Warren Davis, and Jerry Tucker, former UAW
Regional Directors and International Executive Board Members.
Contact
info: Paul Schrade
e-mail:
pschrade@sbcglobal.net
323-656-5623
Warren
Davis
e-mail: Region2wd@aol.com
440-835-5409
Jerry
Tucker
e-mail: jtuckernd@sbcglobal.net
314-968-5534
Statement on Tentative Agreement
Issued
September 26, 2007: by Former UAW International
Executive Board Members: Paul Schrade, Warren Davis, Jerry Tucker
We
regret the decision by the UAW negotiators to tentatively agree to place the
future health care protection of hundreds of thousands of UAW retired members
under a union-run Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA. We
believe it irresponsible by the parties to this negotiation to shift the burden
of risk to the retired workers and their families and release General Motors
from its commitment to the full and perpetual coverage of healthcare for the
workers who built the wealth of the corporation in the first place.
We
have previously noted the lack of any real discussion or debate among the
members and secondary leadership of the union prior to the negotiations on the
VEBA. Springing a new and potentially hazardous economic concept on an
unsuspecting membership, either active or retired, is alien to the democratic
principles in our governing constitution. That a VEBA can be dangerous is well
documented. UAW retired members covered by a VEBA at Caterpillar can painfully
vouch for that. Their VEBA went bust and they now have thousands of dollars in
unanticipated out-of-pocket costs per year for reduced health care protection.
In
a recent letter to International President Gettelfinger,
a prominent Detroit area local union’s leaders stated: “Most VEBA’s allow the companies to wash their hands of retiree
health care. If things don’t go according to ‘plan,’ it will be our own union
telling retirees to drain their life savings to pay for medical care. That’s
unacceptable because it goes against everything our union stands for.” And
even former UAW President Douglas Fraser expressed his reservations about a
VEBA when he said; “God help us if we get into a depression or recession and
the value of the fund plummets and the UAW is sitting there with this huge
liability.”
The
Big 3 clamor to relieve themselves of the cost of
retiree health care may be applauded by Wall Street and the investor class, but
unions have a different responsibility and a different constituency. By going
the VEBA route the parties will have missed a historic opportunity to inject
their significant political clout in the growing push for a national health
care system in this country patterned after the Canadian ‘Medicare for All’
system. That’s a system that each company acknowledges has leveled the
competitiveness playing field for them there.
From
the start, this round of negotiations was projected by the media to be about
what autoworkers could do—meaning give up—to help the domestic auto
manufacturers out of the “competitiveness” hole they’d dug themselves into. Yet
GM showed a profit last quarter of $891 million as reported July 31, 2007 in
Market Watch and their stock is soaring. There are a number of worker
concessions in the tentative agreement which unfairly penalize workers and
their families for management’s design failures.
We respectfully recommend that the GM UAW membership vote “NO” and that
the leadership instruct the workers to remain at work while they rejoin the
negotiations to correct the VEBA mistake and other unjust concessions currently
in the tentative agreement.
Fraternally,
Paul Schrade
Warren Davis
Jerry Tucker
Former UAW Directors: Region 6, Region 2, Region 5