Editor“An injury to one is an injury to all…?”
That General Motors may be looking to slash 15 percent of its skilled trades’ jobs over the next two years may be one reason a majority of skilled trade workers rejected the tentative agreement between GM and the United Auto Workers last week.
Left with three options—to strike, to try to negotiation more for trades, or to override their votes—the UAW may be considering overriding its skilled trade members’ votes, according to WSWS writer Joseph Kishore.
“They are looking at consolidating pipefitters, millwrights and tool fitters,” a skilled trades worker at GM’s Fairfax Assembly Plant in St. Louis, MO is quoted as saying. “From a trade position, the lines of demarcation for your work is all that guarantees your job. They are going to combine those three trades into a general mechanical trade.”
At Fairfax, he said, the company has reassigned a group of production workers as a “tech team” doing a lot of the work that electricians would do. “They are making less for doing a lot of similar work,” he said. “I have nothing against the production workers, but we have been trying to stop this.
“They already got rid of carpenters and painters,” he added. “They are going to eliminate ‘red circle station engineers’ at our plant. They watch and maintain the boilers. That is going away too.”
Read the rest here.
Related:
Add comment