The UAW and General Motors are making amends due to a conflict at GM’s Lordstown plant in Ohio. The conflict stems from GM sending a batch of freshly-manufactured Chevrolet Cruzes to a third party vendor instead of the UAW for various underbody repairs. As you can imagine, the union wasn’t all too happy about The General sending out vehicles it made somewhere else for this work, causeding the plant’s UAW Local to send a letter to all members bashing criticizing GM management. Here are several excerpts from the letter:
“The only time management wants to work jointly is when it benefits them; they have been sneaky, evasive and dishonest on many issues.”
Ouch! The letter goes on to say:
“It’s time to treat management with the same respect that they treat us. So as of today that’s none. Management is not your friend.”
President of UAW Local 1112 Jim Graham said in a phone interview with Automotive News that the harshness of the letter was due the stresses that management and union workers are dealing with to produce the Chevrolet Cruze.
“It’s a family squabble.”
Graham went onto say that “Tempers flared temporarily, but the issue was resolved the next day.”
GM Spokesman Chris Lee said that the UAW and General Motors are jointly working on a resolution that’s expected shortly.
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Update: the flyer created by Graham said the repairs in question were minor fixes to a “switch” and “canister.”
Source: Automotive News
Comments
Wait, if they were newly assembled, then why did they need underbody repairs in the first place?
Anyway, I can’t wait to see this car in person, but not of my local Chevrolet dealers have it on the lot yet.
Exactly! Why in the world do newly-built cars need repairs? Beats me…
But whatever it is, it’s definitely a black eye for GM – which is rather unfortunate!
According to Automotivenews.com, the repairs were to a switch and a canister (possibly the charcoal canister?). Now, let’s be honest with ourselves. One of the reasons we have quality control is to find and remove flaws from cars before they hit the public. What happens when these cars are found to have flaws? They are more than likely removed from the production lines and repaired, right? But repaired where? It would seem to me that the manufacturer has a choice. Option A: Send the vehicles back through the part of the production line that caused the fault in the first place and in the process slow down the production line. Or, Option B, they employ a third party partner to carry out the repairs. Since GM is at a critical stage where they need to deliver the cars, it would seem to me that the latter is the better option. And here we have the UAW embarrassing themselves (again) and GM over absolutely nothing. I’m sure these repairs would not have put one dime in any UAW worker’s pockets whether they did them or not. They should be happy that somebody else has the job of correcting their mistakes. I am one of those people that believes Henry Ford was right about unions.
That’s a good point, Richard. GM probably did have the choice to put the faulty units back on the line, but due to capacity constraints, decided against it. At the end of the day, it’s a black eye for GM and for the UAW – no one wins. Looks like the union made another bad decision.
I wonder, however, whether anyone else has another point of view. Would love to hear it.
Alex Luft
Founder, GM Authority
First one must keep in mind these are massed produced and little things flare up with machines and yes even humans. Thus the need to repair the mishaps on the line. Then all the union members and leaders need to go to school and take some real business classes to understand what it takes to make a company, big or small to function and be profitable so it can pay the extremely high wages it demands.