CAW responds to Chrysler demands

The CAW has publicly responded to Chrysler’s and the government’s demands for $19 per hour in concessions, which culminated in Tom LaSorda’s statement that Chrysler might pull all of its manufacturing from Canada. 

The CAW pointed out that Chrysler has lower hourly labor costs and higher productivity in its Canadian plants than in the U.S., and a higher market share in Canada than in the U.S. The company also benefits from socialized medicine by not having to spend billions on health care in Canada, and can tap a well educated workforce. 

While some have called the CAW “inflexible,” in May 2008 the CAW agreed to a contract which they claimed saved the industry $300 million per year, re-opening the existing contract before its expiration. Later, the CAW agreed to cut labor costs for GM again, and to eliminate a billion dollars in “legacy costs.” 

The CAW’s open letter to the media continued:

We could have reached a valuable new contract with Chrysler, prior to the original March 31 deadline that would have provided substantial savings to the company (including Chrysler-specific productivity and operational changes worth several dollars per hour). But the company, after accepting our offers, always wanted more; with President Obama’s announcement on March 30, our talks were put on the back burner. … 

Now we face the prospect of our own federal government interfering in our negotiations, which were already complex and difficult to begin with. … Seeing our own government echoing perfectly the painful demands made on hard-working, tax-paying Canadians by the executives of multinational corporations is deeply troubling. Worse yet, by clearly taking sides in private negotiations between an employer and the union, and hence emboldening the company to keep asking for more, the federal government is making it harder to reach a deal.

- We do not accept Chrysler’s claim that the work of CAW members costs $76 per hour. This is an inflated and artificial figure that includes many non-relevant factors, such as expenses associated with retirees who have not worked at Chrysler for years, and payroll taxes which are paid to government not to workers. Perhaps most galling of all, Chrysler’s number even includes the proportional cost of downtime and lay-offs. In essence, we are being “charged” for our own unemployment. The best way to reduce that artificial $76 number is to put Chrysler workers back to work: that alone would reduce hourly costs by several dollars per hour.

- And we do not remotely accept the claim that there is cost gap of up to $19 per hour between our facilities and non-union auto assembly plants in Canada. The Canadian executives of Toyota and Honda have described many times their strategy of essentially matching wages, pensions, and core benefits to those paid in CAW-represented facilities (as a key part of their long-term effort to avoid unionization).

- The CAW has a proven track record of ensuring that Canadian plants are competitive within North America… [which is] why our share of total continental production has actually grown in recent years (despite the industry’s overall challenges).