By Micheline Maynard The New York Times Published: October 22, 2007
Detroit - The United Automobile Workers union has come face to face with a protest vote by its members at Chrysler over a tentative labor agreement at the automaker, dimming its chances of winning approval.
Workers at several big Chrysler locals voted against the contract during the weekend. Voting will continue during the next few days, though the union has not said when ratification will be completed.
The no votes, at plants in St. Louis; Newark, Del.; and Detroit, among others, came amid fears by some workers that the contract did not give them as much protection as a similar one at General Motors, which won approval this month.
Those workers see the lack of job guarantees as violating the union's long-held principle of pattern bargaining, or winning the same terms at each Detroit auto company.
The latest plant to reject the contract was Chrysler's Jefferson North factory in Detroit, which makes the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Sixty percent of workers there voted against the contract on Sunday.
"They're not making any investments in future products, so I voted no," said Erik Williams, 36, a Jefferson North assembly line worker. Job protection is a critical point, since Chrysler is in the midst of a revamping effort that will eliminate 13,000 jobs in North America over the next few years, and because the company was sold in August to Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm.
The rejections are "a protest vote against Chrysler, because of the feeling that the pattern has been broken, and Chrysler should have given more guarantees," Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said Sunday.
He added, "It's a protest against the leadership of the U.A.W. for agreeing to this. They want to send the leadership back to the table to get a better deal."
Before that happens, however, U.A.W. leaders are lobbying workers in an effort to win approval for the tentative agreement, which was reached Oct. 10 after a six-hour strike.
Last week, the union's vice president at Chrysler, General Holiefield, spoke at meetings in Detroit and Delaware, while the union sent a letter to local leaders asking them to sign a memo endorsing the contract.
Even the union's president, Ron Gettelfinger, attended sessions at Local 7 in Detroit, which represents workers at the Jefferson North plant who make the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Mr. Gettelfinger sat in the back of the room, however, and did not talk about the contract, participants said.
The U.A.W. had no comment. Privately, union officials said such activity was not unusual when a contract's fate appears uncertain.
Still, Mr. Holiefield's involvement did not lead to victory at the Newark plant, which rejected the contract on Saturday. Chrysler plans to shut the plant under its reorganization program.
The Newark local's president, Richard E. McDonaugh Jr., said those who voted against the contract did not completely understand its details, a theme also raised by other union officials.
Mr. McDonaugh said he was "very, very fearful of what would happen if we go back into negotiations, what they could take away from us. I really feel this was the best deal they could get."
But that deal did not include the same promises of future work that were part of the G.M. contract, according to a summary distributed by the union.
One endangered plant is the St. Louis South factory in Fenton, Mo., which builds minivans. Future investments there depend on sales of Chrysler minivans, which are also built in Windsor, Ontario.
Workers at St. Louis South rejected the contract in results announced Saturday, joining their counterparts at the St. Louis North truck plant, who also voted no last week.
On Sunday, the parking lot at Chrysler's Jefferson North plant in Detroit became a site of debate. Workers huddled in small groups, trying to decide how to vote on the contract.
"There's been so much controversy, I'm just trying to talk to people," said Arthur Parker, 51, a forklift driver, who later said he had voted no.
Jeff Alberts, 48, of Toledo, Ohio, also said he had voted no. "We've got to start somewhere in this country," said Mr. Alberts, who works on the assembly line and has a two-hour daily commute. "The middle class is getting killed."
But James Tucker, 42, another assembly line worker, said he had voted for the contract.
"There's a lot of competition out there now," he said, referring to plants owned by foreign auto companies in the United States, "and if we go back to the table, we could end up with less than what we have now."
Nick Bunkley and Mary M. Chapman contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/business/22auto.html?_r=1&ref=business&ore f=slogin
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