Bob King has two distinct goals as he leads the United Auto Workers union in this year’s contract talks with Detroit auto makers.
The primary objective is to reach an agreement that is fair to the nearly 114,000 Chrysler, Ford and General Motors employees represented by the UAW, while also enabling the companies to increase their sales and profitability.
But in the back of King’s mind is a firm vision to establish a global environment where auto makers compete on the basis of quality and innovation, instead of production cost.
History says the first agenda item will be resolved within weeks. The timeline for the second goal: not soon, according to industry-watchers.
Yet the bookish but sometimes fiery union president methodically lays the groundwork for mechanisms to smooth out the wage-structure anomalies that divide low-cost labor markets such as China and Mexico from nations such as the U.S., where pay scales are dramatically higher.
King touches on these views today in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club. But in an interview with WardsAuto, he says: “As long as workers are building vehicles under slave conditions or very low-wage conditions, that undermines the security of our membership.”
He also provides a barometer for the tenor of this year’s negotiations. The disparity will be addressed “not by bringing us down, but by bringing everybody else up.”
Earlier this year, King hosted a meeting in Detroit with his overseas counterparts. From those talks came a deal to share best practices with the union that represents Fiat workers in Italy.
“That can help the company also, because you can have good discussions on quality and productivity and getting health-and-safety practices,” he says.
The UAW hopes to entice Chrysler to participate. The union already has established a global discussion framework with Ford and GM.
The Ford relationship is “the most mature,” King says. “They’ve really been open to having discussions with unions and been willing to share information and share best practices and be able to raise concerns.”
Even though King insists he has no designs on harmonizing collective agreements on a global basis, Sean McAlinden of the Center for Automotive Research warns the UAW leader’s vision is “pretty ambitious.”
King “believes labor forces are pitted against each other worldwide and exchange rates are also used to punish workers and that all workers can benefit if they organize,” says McAlinden, Michigan-based CAR’s chief economist.
The union leader would “love” to visit China to help organize workers, MacAlinden tells WardsAuto. “But they’d probably arrest him.”
King would not have to go that far to find resistance to his vision. An executive with a leading design firm that specializes in building manufacturing plants says auto makers and suppliers purposely avoid U.S. states were UAW presence is strong.
“It’s one of the top topics,” says Alexandra Segers, senior account executive at SSOE International.
Segers’ take on the OEM experience in Europe belies King’s optimistic views. In Germany, workers are entitled to time off totaling more than 45 days, including vacation.
“And they are only working 35 hours a week,” she says. “That’s why, mainly, all the European auto makers, and also the Koreans and Japanese, are looking to the U.S. at the moment.”
And they primarily are looking at states in the Southeast, where the UAW has little presence and union supporters are unprotected by labor laws, according to critics.
“Workers (there) do not have the democratic right to (join) a union,” King tells journalists following his speech.
