Bill Parker is right: The proposed contract between Chrysler LLC and the United Auto Workers does break the "pattern" established over the past 70-some years of bargaining, but mostly because it was already crumbling.
As chairman of the UAW-Chrysler national bargaining committee, he probably read in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that Honda Motor Co. is hiring for its new plant in Indiana and planning to pay between $15 and $18 an hour for work on the assembly line, compared with $24 an hour or so in a typical UAW plant.
He knows that Toyota Motor Co. plants down south are diverging from the company's practice of matching the basic UAW wage scale in places like Kentucky and instead are paying a premium on the local prevailing manufacturing wage, substantially below UAW scale.
And it's no secret to anyone paying attention to the details that the pattern has been under enormous stress as Detroit's automakers lost market share, their respective troubles diverged, the UAW-Big Three ranks dwindled and foreign rivals claiming half of U.S. sales built plants in mostly nonunion states.
The UAW's stranglehold on the wage-and-benefit scales in U.S. auto assembly plants is gone, a fact implicitly recognized by the deal that union President Ron Gettelfinger and his bargainers reached with General Motors Corp. The fundamental question facing UAW-Chrysler members as they consider their proposed contract, already rejected by several influential locals, is what other options they may have besides ratifying the unpopular deal.
Parker, in a thoughtfully worded two-page memo posted on the Internet, urges a return to the bargaining table.
"The pattern set at General Motors undermines years of gains by our union and breaks faith with our own traditions," he said, decrying the institution of a lower, second-tier wage for new hires, few new production commitments, the division of union jobs into "core" and "non-core" and limitations on the jobs bank. "The 2007 GM pattern agreement effectively ends many of the principles established 70 years ago in the UAW's birth."
He's right, however much management and the UAW brass may not want to hear it. But that's where decades of denying reality and hoping for the best, on both sides, can lead -- to uncompromising compromises.
There are other options:
There's a restart of the union's barely six-hour strike against Chrysler, a walkout pegged more to bickering between top union officials and folks like Parker over the tentative agreement than any disagreement with Chrysler or its private-equity owners at Cerberus Capital Management LP. OK, then what?
'No deal' wouldn't be good
There's the increasing possibility that UAW-Chrysler members may be the first unit in the union's history with Detroit's automakers to reject a national tentative agreement, undermining Gettelfinger and seriously complicating pending talks with a sick Ford Motor Co.
If failing to ratify the UAW-Chrysler deal isn't such a potentially negative development, do you think national union leaders -- including Gettelfinger and General Holiefield, head of the UAW-Chrysler Department -- would be lobbying locals to approve the deal?
Of course not. Gettelfinger never actually put before his Chrysler members the 2005 health care concession package the union reached with GM and Ford because UAW leaders feared the rank-and-file would see the deep pockets of the German parent company and vote no.
The deal that UAW-Chrysler members are considering essentially acknowledges what the rest of the auto industry has known for some time: The pattern already is broken, a casualty of competition and unique problems at each of the Big Three.
Chrysler's UAW members do have choices -- between the decline of the present, the uncertainty of confrontation with a new kind of owner or the potential revival of the future. The only option off the table is the better times of days gone by.
