GE Aerospace workers in Ohio explain impact of UAW givebacks and
Two General Electric Aerospace workers, Joe and Jake, recently described conditions at their Cincinnati, Ohio area plant and why they were supporting Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman’s campaign for president of the United Auto Workers. Both are employed at GE’s Evendale, Ohio, facility where 500 UAW Local 647 members assemble, test and service aviation engines built by GE and its jo--t venture partner, French-based Safran Aircraft Engines.
Jake, Joe and brother Jeff
“COVID and the Boeing 737 Max fiasco had a big impact on GE and our plant,” Joe, a worker with eight years at the Evendale plant, told the World Socialist Web Site. “Boeing pushed workers, under capitalism, to get production out, and as a result people died. At the same time, GE has moved a large portion of its jet engine work to nonunion factories,” in Alabama, New Hampshire and other states.
Now you have some union leaders telling the workers, ‘Bust your bu-t and ki-l it or you won’t have a job.’ These young workers hear somebody in authority saying that and what else are they going to do?
“In the old days, the last thing a supervisor wanted to see was a UAW committeeman. Now some supervisors actively seek out a committeeman when they are trying to get more work out of us and are encountering resistance.
“There was a non-written agreement that nobody would work overtime to make sure we don’t mess up or get hurt. The company convinced the local union president to tell us to work overtime or they were going to take the work away. Workers resisted, but three months later they got some of the workers to take overtime, breaking solidarity. The work was taken from us regardless because that was always GE’s plan.”
Joe said the Evendale facility has been transformed into the new headquarters of GE Aviation, now called GE Aerospace. “The CEO Lawrence Culp walks through the plant and it feels like the King Lord viewing his peasants to see how his crops are doing. It’s insulting to see how some union leadership colludes with him and the company.
“Because they are not hiring, their solution is to bring back the ‘team’ concept and lean manufacturing. Team leaders do the supervisor’s job and workers are doing multiple jobs at one time. None of this is in the contract, but management says they are doing this to ‘empower you guys.’
“Some union reps completely buy into this. The assumption seems to be that the company holds all the power with respect to our jobs and therefore we have to collude and plead with the company to secure our jobs. UAW officials feel they have to prove that the union can comply with this ‘lean manufacturing,’ which only means doing more with less by cutting the workforce and enforcing market-based/tiered wages. But we know that lean manufacturing is just a way of gaining concessions and increasing profits and stock prices for the shareholders. It’s as anti-labor as the automation push was in the post-war period.
“They sell this team stuff by claiming it will lead to better working conditions and greater ‘autonomy.’ What it really means is to extract more labor and profits from the workers. Every year their mantra is we are making record profits. The second shift UAW committeeman has bought into the lies that this will protect jobs. He echoes management’s threats against us and lives by the motto of union collusion.
“It’s perverse and baseless. The assumption is that management holds the power, and the workers have none. We’ve told him, we reject your premise.
Jake described how the UAW bureaucracy’s collusion had led to a severe regression in workers’ living standards and conditions.
“All we’ve been getting with the UAW for decades are concessions. Nobody wanted these rotten contracts, and workers voted against them, but they passed every time. We are the aerospace part of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America. But our wages and benefits have not kept up with other aviation mechanics.
“The company has been trying to get two-tier wages, but the union officials know they couldn’t get a contract passed with that. In 2017, GE tried to reopen our contract and introduce ‘market-based wages’ for new workers. The company said this was ‘very competitive’ pay, but the union said no. But they gave up other concessions, and workers hired after 2012 don’t have pensions, as much vacation time and other benefits. We have a quasi-tier system because it takes new hires five years to get the 10 percent shift differentials. For years, GE has been trying to divide the new workers from those with 10 years and more.”
Jake explained that there are several unions at General Electric, with the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) playing the leading role in the Coordinated Bargaining Committee (CBC) of GE unions.
During the last contract negotiations in 2019, Jake said, talks lasted until the final week before the expiration of the old contract. “The union told workers to prepare to strike if a provisional agreement was not reached by midnight Sunday. Many of the workers were sick of concessions and were ready to fight. Guys were bringing home their personal stuff and were ready to strike. However, a deal was struck behind closed doors by the IUE leader [Jerry Carney] behind the backs of the rest of the unions in the CBC.”
The UAW Local 647 leadership, he said, “then went on a campaign to try and convince the local guys to vote ‘yes’ on the contract. UAW officials said you have to accept the contract because it’s the company’s ‘last, best, and final offer’ and we had our UAW international area rep tell us in a union meeting not to expect to get anything better. In the end, the deal passed by only a few percentage points of the votes,” Jake said. The contract “reduced overtime premiums for coming into work early from double time to time-and-a-half and increased by one hour how long you had to work to get overtime. They also took away COLA, our health care premiums went up and dental and vision was put on a paid premium tier.”
Jake described the abusive conditions in the factory, enforced by management and the UAW, which endanger workers and those who fly in the planes. “The company gives out gift cards to get workers to speed up on inspections—for jet engines! That’s their ‘lean manufacturing.’ They want to do more with less, and lean on the worker, especially the younger ones who don’t know they have the right to refuse to do unsafe work. They have created an atmosphere of intimidation in the plants.
“We build massive jet engines that are thousands of pounds. During a snowstorm, the guys wanted to go home early so they would not be stuck in the storm. The supervisor said they couldn’t go until they towed the engine they were working on to the test cells. They had to pull this engine with a tugger across a long distance within the two-mile campus outside in extreme inclement winter weather.
“There were a mix of new guys and seasoned guys, and they wanted to hurry because of the snowstorm. But the tugger jack-knifed with the engine in tow. Thank God nobody was hurt. Then one of these guys got their personal truck to try to push the engine and the tugger. These workers felt they couldn’t say no and tell the supervisor that their lives were more important than his production deadlines. The supervisor responsible for this never received any punishment for his actions.
“All the new hires have been put on second shift, and a whole culture has been created where they are pitted against the older workers and vice versa. Some UAW leaders and management tell these younger workers, ‘You’re the ones who are going to save this plant.’ The union leadership encourages this cut-throat culture, which is a gift to the company. They’ve bought into it entirely. The committeeman says, ‘Work as fast as you can, work yourself out of a job, so I can advocate to bring in more work.’ The new guys don’t know any better because the company and the union are telling them the same thing.”
Joe concluded by pointing to the broader issues facing the working class, including the danger of nuclear war. “You go to work, and you see a big picture of [former GE CEO Jack] Welch and George W. Bush. A lot of our work is for the defense industry. I like the way Will put it: Workers have no interest in fighting wars against each other. The working class only has international interests. Wars pit the working class against the working class on behalf of the ruling class. It’s the workers, the poor farmers who die for the military industrial complex. And when you are at GE, you are in the belly of the beast.