What's happening in the auto contract negotiations

To: Detroit Workers' Voice mailing list
March 6. 2015
RE: Against the failure of the UAW union
leadership to fight for worker demands

Below is an appeal by Tim Hall for support for a demonstration by rank-and-file auto workers in Detroit

Friends,

Please come out Saturday, March 7, at noon at Solidarity House, 8000 East Jefferson, to support UAW [United Auto Workers] workers who are calling for the demands below in contract negotiations.

Workers from other industries and and supporters should come out too. I will be there with a sign saying “Postal Workers Support Auto Workers! No to Two-Tier Wage System!”

The two-tier wage system, whereby new workers come in at half pay and never catch up, was introduced in 2007 in the auto industry and later, in 2012, in  postal. We postal workers are suffering from it now (ours is actually three-tier). Current APWU [American Postal Workers Union] president Dimondstein is not focusing on eliminating the three-tier system in the current negotiations. Auto is in negotiations right now and there is strong rank-and-file sentiment against the two-tier system, but the UAW leadership is taking a similarly soft stand on two-tier. The two-tier (or more tiers) system not only robs the younger generation of workers of their future, but it pits the younger and older workers against each other, thus violating union solidarity and weakening the workers' struggle against the bosses and their demands for concessions of all sorts. 

Let us build solidarity between postal and auto workers! Let's stand up against the two and three-tier wage systems and other concessions! . . .

Please share this post with other workers and interested people.

--Tim Hall, a retired postal worker and editor of  "Struggle" magazine, an anti-establishment, revolutionary literary zine oriented to the working-class struggle (www.strugglemagazine.net)

Demo demands:

• End 2 tier, AWS (alternate work schedule - which includes 10 hour days without overtime pay), and WCL
• Retirees made whole
• Compassionate attendance policy
• COLA (cost of living raises) reinstated
• Wage increase
• Clean, safe work environment

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Posted on March 7, 2015.
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