Tradesmen Trouble

Pistol shots crackled one afternoon last week in Dearborn, the Detroit suburb that is home to the Ford Motor Co.'s sprawling Rouge plant and to the United Auto Workers' 34,000-man Local 600. William Harrell, a skilled millwright, was shot in the backside by a man whom bystanders identified as an officer of Harrell's own local. The two men had been on opposing sides of a bitter internal battle over the U.A.W.'s newly negotiated contract with Ford. On one side are the union's skilled tradesmen--the tool-and diemakers, electricians, mechanics, millwrights and repairmen. On the other side stand the union's leadership and the unskilled and semiskilled production workers.

The shooting was the most serious skirmish, but hardly the only one, since the agreement was reached with Ford three weeks ago. The tradesmen have argued with their officers, fists have flown, and skilled union workers have picketed Solidarity House, the U.A.W.'s international headquarters. The fighting centered on the major issue in this year's auto industry negotiations: overtime.

All of Ford's workers have demanded, and won, the right to refuse extra working hours. Ford negotiators, worried that a refusal by skilled tradesmen to work overtime might tie up their plants, bargained a key clause into the contract. The clause permits management to meet the tradesmen's refusals to work by filling the gaps with unskilled workers and part-timers, or by jobbing the work out to nonunion shops. To the tradesmen, some of whom earn well over $20,000 a year, the threat of replacement by unskilled or nonunion workers was a challenge to their status and, in the long run, to their job security. "It hit us right where it hurts," said an angry electrician. "You can't tell me any production worker can come in and do my job."

Major Turn Down. The tradesmen damned the contract as a sellout, and they urged the rank and file to reject it. Ignoring that call, the regular production workers voted in favor, 119,925 to 38,684. Under a union bylaw, however, the tradesmen can reject any part of a contract dealing specifically with them, and they voted against the agreement 20,089 to 5,943. Never before had a contract recommended by U.A.W. negotiators been turned down by a major constituency.

After agonizing over the vote for three days, U.A.W. President Leonard Woodcock announced that the contract had been ratified, but that he would go back to renegotiate the disputed clause. Ford officials, he said, are "sensible people who will sit down and work out a solution." Ford's chief negotiator, Malcolm Denise, seeing his respected adversary on the spot, agreed to try. The tradesmen then cooled down and seemed willing, at least for a time, to let Woodcock settle their grievance.

This was not the first time that the U.A.W. tradesmen had been rebellious. They began agitating for special treatment in the late 1950s, threatening to defect to other unions or to form their own. By letting them veto parts of the contract, union chiefs put down the insurrection, though uprisings still occur and probably will continue to do so.

Woodcock badly needs the support of all his members. He is negotiating with General Motors, last of the Big Three in this year's round of new contracts. At week's end, as he approached the time at which he was authorized to call a strike, Woodcock said that the company and the union were still "a long way apart." The key issues were overtime, wages and improved pensions. But he was determined to avoid a costly general strike, because the union's strike fund is low and because with the oil crisis threatening to cut demand for new cars, Woodcock recognizes that "the auto industry is facing a difficult future." For the sake of the industry as well as his members, he was not about to create any more major difficulties.

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