GENERAL Motors, the largest car maker in the world, and the United Automobile Workers (UAW), the most powerful union in the US, have made a deal. They won't discuss the deal until the workers at two brake manufacturing plants in Dayton, Ohio, where a strike began 18 days ago, have voted on it.
The strike may be the most important ever waged in the US. It was not about "downsizing" the euphemism for firing workers but that was the shadow looming over it. Wall Street, which likes "downsizing", paid close attention to the outcome although only 3,000 workers were involved when it began.
Even though the result is not known at this writing, the strikers seemed happy the battle was over. One worker said "I'm ecstatic. I have a job and my son will have a job loo." The union leadership recommended acceptance.
Although the last big car strike in 1970, also pitted the UAW against General Motors, GM is a generous employer in pay and benefits and is not trying to smash the union, which is what most US strikes seem to be about now.
The issue was "out sourcing". The Dayton brake making plants went to outside companies obviously with GM approval for parts. The union claimed it had a promise this would not happen which GM denies. It gave the contracts to the most competitive bidders, including non union companies.
About 175,800 workers in the US, Canada and Mexico were laid off during the strike which cost GM hundreds of millions of dollars and crippled its operations. The workers also want better safety measures and more workers hired. Overtime runs as high as $30,000 per worker annually.
A compromise permitting some "out sourcing" is expected to be the outcome of the strike and GM will employ 300 more workers. A side benefit for US labour is the unexpected militancy displayed by these highly paid workers who might well be called "the aristocrats" of the American trade union movement.
This is good news for unions in general which have been losing strikes since the former president of the Screen Actors' Guild, in his new role as President of the US, fired the country's air traffic controllers for calling an illegal strike in August 1981.
Patco, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation, was a special case. It was not a member of the AFL-CIO, America's trade union federation. Few trades unionists sympathised with Patco, whose members earned about $35,000 a year, a fortune at the time. But a lifetime ban on rehiring was thought too harsh a punishment for the offence.
In the 1970s and 1980s, unions lost members as well as strikes. Wages were forced down and bore little relation to productivity. Corporate globalism became the goal. In pursuit of it laws were passed encouraging strike breaking. What were called "replacement workers" and "scabs", gained respectable legal status. Lacklustre trade union national leadership seemed incapable of dealing with the problem.
Patrick Buchanan's candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination helped to change this climate as he cited facts and figures about the decline of US working class incomes on the primary circuit. He's no particular favourite of the unions who mostly ignored him. At times he sounded like a turn of the century Wobbly as he discoursed on the exploitation of the US working class.
It also coincided with a change in the national leadership of the AFL-CIO. John Sweeney, the new president, is among the best union organisers in the US. He comes from a union that represents janitors and other once lowly paid workers which doubled its membership while he led it. It won a bitter strike in New York trudging in the snow last Christmas. The company hired scabs but lost nevertheless.
Sweeney's father was a member of Mike Quill's Transport Workers' Union of America, and John told this correspondent he was raised on Quill's principles and methods. They seem to work.
The UAW is the union of the late Walter Reuther who died in a tragic air crash. He also reunited the AFL and CIO in the early 1950s.
