By IPS Correspondents
TAMPA, Florida, Oct 11 2007 (IPS)

Even as the United Auto Workers (UAW) voted to ratify a comprehensive new four-year contract with the U.S. automaker General Motors Wednesday, and reached a similar deal with Chrysler, whether the outcome represents a victory for the country’s dwindling organised labour movement remains open to interpretation.

Late last month, members of the UAW staged a nationwide walkout – the first major strike against General Motors (GM) in 37 years. At issue was job security for GM workers and the transfer of GM retiree health care benefits to an independent trust fund that would be operated by UAW personnel.

GM managers had argued that cutbacks were necessary to make the company competitive again in the car production business. In 2006, GM was one of many Detroit, Michigan-based U.S. automakers which posted a collective 15-billion-dollar loss.

In the end, the UAW strike lasted only two days – in contrast to the last nationwide strike against GM in 1970, which dragged on for more than two months.

The settlement between the UAW and GM included lower hourly wages for some of the union’s 73,000 members. A trust fund, known as a Voluntary Employee Benefits Association, was created so that GM can transfer 35 billion dollars of its 51 billion dollars in retiree health insurance off of its ledgers.

David Cole, chairman of the Centre for Automotive Research (CAR), a Michigan-based non-profit group that tracks industry trends, believes that the GM-UAW labour agreement will lead to a major shift in the day-to-day relationship between unions and employers in the U.S. because “the contract discusses a two-tiered payment scale and it means that there will be fewer higher-paid people in the union scale, which is an incredibly important point for the unions.”

The two-tier wage plan creates a new class of workers who perform so-called non-core functions, and who will be paid 14-16 dollars per hour, about half the hourly rate of current assembly workers, as well as receiving fewer benefits.

While the union says this concession is helping to keep jobs from moving to cheaper labour markets overseas, some critics argue that it betrays fundamental principles of equality and could lead to a new race to the bottom for all workers.

“In my 28 years working for General Motors, this is the most negative reaction to a contract I’ve ever seen,” Todd Seguin, who is on the executive board of UAW Local 1853, told the Washington Post earlier this week. “People are very unhappy.”

According to the U.S. Department of Labour, trade union membership is currently 15.4 million workers, just 12.5 percent of the total workforce. American union membership in the private sector has in recent years fallen to less than 9 percent – levels not seen since 1932.

Still, Cole believes that the success of the contract, which received about two-thirds support from UAW members, will likely prompt other unions to use it as a template in their own negotiations.

Cole thinks that the agreement hammered out between GM and UAW President Ron Gettelfinger “will make it easier when the UAW has to negotiate new contracts with Chrysler and Ford in the coming weeks. He can say to both of those automakers: ‘We worked out an agreement with GM. Why can’t we work out an agreement with you?'”.

The “us-against-them” days between employers and unions are done, according to Cole. “There’s now a recognition that they’re dependent on one another,” he said.

Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union, which supported the UAW during its two-day strike, agreed: “We’ve always had a lot more in common than apart,” he said “because we’re both concerned about such things as quality and production and also the fact that it’s profitable for both unions and the automakers.”

“The ability to work out day-to-day problems is much better today than 20 years ago because the automakers are more willing to listen,” he said.

However, Stewart Acuff, the national organising director for the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), had a different take on the situation.

“More and more unions are spending more and more time and money and resources to grow, both here and all over the world. We now have an epidemic of far right-wing governments doing everything in their power to prevent unions from organising and even existing, in some cases,” Acuff said.

“It used to be that communities and governments in the [U.S.] southern states would purposefully work to keep unions out of their states,” he told IPS. “Sometimes they even worked together to do this. But now communities and governments want to keep unions out of states in the northeast, the midwest, and all over America.”

“It’s a worldwide problem,” Acuff added.

The AFL-CIO is hosting a Global Organising Structure Conference in Washington on Dec. 11-12 with about 250 union leaders from every continent to address the assaults on unions both here in the U.S. and in countries like Colombia.

According to Colombia’s National Trade Union School, 2,245 trade unionists were murdered between January 1991 and December 2006, while 138 were victims of forced disappearance and 3,400 were the targets of threats. This makes Colombia “one of the most dangerous places in the world for trade unionists,” says Amnesty International.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch says 75 percent of the attacks were committed by the far-right paramilitary groups that are allied with government forces.

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