Respected UAW leader faces a challenging test

Ron Gettelfinger's five-year tenure as president of the United Auto Workers has been marked by a shrewd, tough, practical approach to saving automotive jobs and benefits. His biggest challenge is just ahead: Contract talks begin Friday with Detroit's three automakers, General Motors (GM), Ford Motor (F) and Chrysler Group (DCX).

"I think he's certainly the right guy for this time," automotive consultant Ron Harbour says. "He truly wanted to understand the situation and the industry, and really has the best interest of everybody in mind, the success of the companies, the success of the union, and wants to make sure they all survive."

The challenge for the UAW is daunting. "The contract has to be transformational," says David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. That means potentially life-changing concessions on the part of UAW members, who are used to some of the best wages and benefits in industrial America.

Cole says if anybody can achieve a soft landing for both the companies and the union, it's Gettelfinger. But it won't be easy.

Lots of practice

Since Gettelfinger's days at Ford's Louisville plant in the 1960s and '70s, tough bargaining has been a way of life.

"I have never been in a set of negotiations that wasn't difficult, regardless of the times," Gettelfinger said in a recent interview with Detroit radio host Paul W. Smith.

Gettelfinger rose from the plant floor at Louisville to regional UAW director in Indianapolis to head of the union's Ford department in 1998 before succeeding the late Stephen Yokich as president in 2002.

Gettelfinger always has kept long hours and demanded that his staffers do the same. As a regional director, and later running the union's Ford department, he virtually banned the practice of staffers golfing on UAW time.

He sometimes held contract bargaining sessions that lasted 24 hours or longer. Even now, approaching age 63, he hasn't slackened his pace.

Richard Shoemaker, the retired UAW vice president who oversaw the GM department, said that on many mornings, he and Gettelfinger would arrive at the union's Solidarity House headquarters at 5 a.m. and still be there at 7 or 8 at night.

"I was impressed with Ron's knowledge of the industry," Shoemaker recalls. "He understood the bargaining process and how to work it."

The effort to save jobs and benefits continues to this day. UAW officials sometimes privately complain that Gettelfinger and the union don't get credit in the media for a remarkable record, even as they get chided in the same forums for union membership levels that are the lowest in decades.

That record includes organizing victories at Johnson Controls and other suppliers early in Gettelfinger's tenure, and a 2003 contract with GM, Ford and Chrysler that was better than many dared hope.

It contained some higher health care co-pays, and it slowed wage growth. But it retained the generous UAW contract almost intact, including the so-called jobs bank that pays laid-off workers.

"That 2003 agreement was a great contract, and that's especially true when you consider the domestic industry hasn't been real strong for a long time," Shoemaker says.

A win at Delphi

Gettelfinger also engineered a settlement with GM and supplier Delphi that, while cutting wages almost in half, contains generous transition payments from GM to affected Delphi workers.

The agreement, announced in June after more than a year of bitter talks and public recriminations, gave workers the soft landing that many thought impossible. Gettelfinger persuaded GM to pay more than $7 billion for buyouts for departing Delphi employees; to make annual payments of $35,000 for three years to Delphi workers who stay on at reduced wages; and to give some workers the right to flow back into GM jobs that might become available.

Compared with what happens to many laid-off workers in the USA — little or no severance pay, loss of health care coverage and perhaps loss of a pension — the Delphi deal astonished many.

"That settlement was beyond my best expectations," former UAW president Doug Fraser says. "I think he played it absolutely correctly, both from a strategic and tactical point of view."