UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and his colleagues at Solidarity House will soon retire on their very safe, healthcare protected and lucrative pensions. But UAW workers and retirees will never recover from the damage these people have done to their working conditions, incomes and retirements.
In the six short years since Gettelfinger took office, the nation has come to loath blue-collar autoworkers. Past UAW president and founding father, Walter Reuther, was a principled labor leader of vision. Reuther had a backbone and refused to become a corporate puppet. The companies and nation thrived, the middle class expanded and the world respected autoworkers and copied the responsible contracts resulting from Reuther’s tenure. Walter never apologized for his workers making a decent wage, never betrayed his retirees and always said that you could tell the quality of a union leadership by how they treated their defenseless retirees.
Ron Gettelfinger has been apologizing for and concessioning away workers’ wages and benefits ever since he took office.
In the auto loan hearings the insulated, smiling, anti-union, photo-op politicians and their biased and naive witnesses from academia, none of whom has ever spent a minute slaving on an assembly line, falsely suggested that the fault of the auto industries’ woes were due primarily to union workers and retirees.
The politicians are wrong, the befuddled prejudiced witnesses are wrong and what they said is bogus. The indisputable facts are that 90% of the costs of building an automobile are “not” worker related. The particulars are that Gettelfinger’s ongoing concessions have not made and “will never make a difference” because workers and retirees were never the problem.
Auto executives have been able to snooker, pat on the head and backslap Gettelfinger as they danced him to the cliff, but Gettelfinger never jumped. Instead, he pushed his trusting membership off that lethal overhang. Gettelfinger simply couldn’t stop saying yes to the companies when he should have been saying no.
Many of the politicians involved in the loan proceedings were campaigning in the recent presidential election. They were pushing for healthcare for Americans, were courting support from autoworkers and got it. Now these same hypocritical politicians are deceitfully double-talking to crush the auto retirees by leading the raid to steal their healthcare.
Gettelfinger has remained silent. Instead of using the national spotlight to tell the world that retirees and workers have been a hard working and committed workforce who have given their labor, accumulated experience, knowledge, wisdom, and skills to advance these American based multi-national companies and build the American dream for our entire nation, Gettelfinger has refused to speak out.
Gettelfinger’s concessions have forced autoworkers to suffer with condemnation, substandard unfair wage configurations and sliced protective work rules. Union officials have consciously refused to keep pension buying power of older retirees in line with inflation as they attempt to steal their health care. Divorcing himself from and declaring open season on his struggling retirees on their critical healthcare benefits, Gettelfinger has reduced UAW retirees to collective beggars.
Corporations have always had pipe dreams of gullible union officials who would allow them to legally walk away from their full healthcare responsibilities. Never until Ron Gettelfinger would past UAW administrations ever consider it. It was unthinkable. Healthcare is a life and death benefit for retirees.
Auto factories are unhealthy places to work. In many manufacturing plants the workers’ life expectancy is less then the normal life expectancy because of the exposure to smoke, fumes, carcinogens and all the other multiple workplace chemicals and hazards. Some plants have tremendous long-term health problems including cancer that come from worker exposure. These diseases many times don’t surface for years until workers retire. Past UAW leaders knew this and negotiated hard won retirements and health care benefits to protect retirees because of it. Never mentioned is the fact that retiree healthcare benefits were paid for by retirees during their working years in lieu of wages.
Retirees own these benefits. That is why Gettelfinger and company has to go to court to get at them. As the retirees paid for these benefits during their working years, their union officials refused to vest them and spent the retiree healthcare funds elsewhere. UAW retirees should not be forced to their knees in retirement and treated like a piece of garbage.
UAW retirees can never hope to afford to live in dignity since Gettelfinger unfairly betrayed the union retirement promise. He not only failed to negotiate basic pension increases for older retirees to keep up with rising inflation, but also went to court to obtain the legal right to concession away the little income that they do get.
The elderly UAW retirees lacked the options for building their own pensions available to today’s workers. Their entire wherewithal is dependent on the fixed retirement promises made to them at the time of retirement. Simply put, elderly UAW retirees cannot afford to pay for healthcare. Stealing the health care of these already besieged elderly retirees, whose meager pensions have lagged far behind inflation and are much smaller than more recent retirees, would be to repay these needy retirees with a potential catastrophic health related death sentence.
Regrettably, it is indisputable that Gettelfinger has been running the UAW as a company union and has used his power and influence against those he should be representing to race the clock back 70 years to evaporate all the gains. His tenure has been a C.E.O.’s dream and a nightmare for union members. He has volunteered and sacrificed members' pensions, jobs, health care, benefits, wages, work rules, and worker solidarity. He has become a corporate cheerleader “expecting continual worker sacrifices” and become the representative and facilitator for job destroying corporate restructuring, signing ongoing local “ New Operating Agreements” that evaporate long-standing job protections. He has allowed the companies to gut wages by replacing existing workers with new workers at half the wages.
The ironic thing about this is that none of it had to happen. It hasn’t helped and it won’t help. For shockingly cooperating in unreasonable ways with the corporate executives who have shamefully used him, for refusing to defend UAW members, for taking struggling UAW retirees to court in order to negotiate away their healthcare benefits, for ignoring the needs of workers and their families, for breaking sacred solidarity and shamefully redefining the term union, the wretched record of Gettelfinger and his colleagues, who have betrayed the very premise of what they were elected to do, will be recorded in labor history. That will be their dishonorable testament and legacy. The assault against working Americans by the very powers that should be protecting them is a betrayal and a cultural tragedy. History will hold them accountable.
Michael Westfall is a former autoworker and UAW union official. His website can be seen here.
