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- W1570201598 abstract "This article is part of the collection of writings of Mike (Marshall) Westfall, retired autoworker from General Motors in Flint, Michigan (1964-1994) and activist critic of the auto industry restructuring that led to devastating job losses. It originally appeared online in The Westfall Papers. [http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/id121.html, accessed 12/14/2011] This article is available at DigitalCommons@ILR: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/westfall/9 RON GETTELFINGERS DESTRUCTION OF UAW PRESIDENT WALTER REUTHERS UNION http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/id121.html[11/2/2011 10:37:08 AM] RON GETTELFINGERS DESTRUCTION OF UAW PRESIDENT WALTER REUTHERS UNION By Mike Westfall 2008 Past UAW President and founding father, Walter Reuther, was a strong principled labor leader of vision. Walter had a backbone and refused to become a corporate puppet. Walter knew that if you were to get respect that you had to demand it. The companies and nation thrived, the middle class expanded and the world respected autoworkers and copied the responsible contracts resulting from Walters’s tenure. Walter never apologized for his workers making a decent wage, never betrayed his retirees and always said that you could tell the quality of a union leadership by how they treated their defenseless retirees. In the six short years since UAW President Ron Gettelfinger has taken office he has been apologizing for and sacrificing scapegoated autoworkers wages, pensions and benefits.The world now loathes UAW members and accept that if the their own UAW President believes their work life and standard of living is so exceptional, that their retirees health care is so unimportant and all the painfully hard won gains won over the life of the UAW are now gratuitous that it must be so. Gettelfinger and his colleagues at Solidarity House will soon retiree on their separate, lucrative, secure and healthcare protected pensions. UAW workers and retirees however will never recover from the damage these people have done to them and their families. Gettelfinger should to be shamed and expelled from Detroit. In the auto loan hearings the insulated, smiling, anti-union, photo opt. politicians and their biased and naive witnesses from academia land, none of whom has ever spent a minute slaving on an assembly line, falsely suggested that the fault of the auto industries’ woes were due primarily to union workers and retirees. The politicians are wrong, the befuddled prejudiced witnesses are wrong and what they said is bogus. The indisputable facts are that 90% of the costs of building an automobile are “not” worker related. The particulars are that Gettelfinger’s unending concessions have not made and “will never make a difference” because workers and retirees were never the problem. Auto executives have been able to snooker, backslap and dance Gettelfinger to the edge of the cliff and he pushed his trusting membership off that lethal overhang because he simply couldn’t stop saying yes to the companies when he should have been saying no. Many of the politicians involved in the loan proceedings were campaigning for healthcare in the recent presidential election and were supported by a majority of autoworkers. Now these same hypocritical double-talking politicians are using their pulpits to ridicule America’s autoworkers and deceitfully crush the auto retirees by calling them unfortunate legacy costs as they push for the theft of their healthcare. Instead of using the national spotlight to tell the world that retirees and workers have been a hard working and committed workforce who have given their labor, accumulated experience, knowledge, wisdom, and skills to advance these American based multi-national companies and build the American dream for our entire nation, Gettelfinger has remained painfully silent. Gettelfinger’s weakness for concessions has forced autoworkers to suffer with condemnation, substandard unfair wage configurations and sliced protective work rules. These union officials have consciously refused to keep pension buying power of older retirees in line with inflation. Divorcing himself from his struggling retirees, Gettelfinger has reduced these retirees to collective beggars. In the auto industry it is well known that the factories are unhealthy places to work. In many manufacturing plants the workers’ life expectancy is less then the normal life expectancy because of the exposure to strong carcinogens and multiple other workplace chemicals and hazards unique to the building of automobiles. Plants are known to have enormous long-term health problems including cancer that come from worker exposure over the decades of labor. These diseases many times don’t surface until workers retire. Past UAW leaders knew this and negotiated hard won retirements and health care benefits to protect retirees because of it. Corporations have always had pipe dreams of gullible union officials who would allow them to legally walk away from their full healthcare responsibilities. Never until Ron Gettelfinger would past UAW administrations ever consider it. It was unthinkable because Healthcare is a life and death benefit for retirees. Gettelfinger never mentions the fact that retiree healthcare benefits was negotiated and paid for by retirees during their working years in lieu" @default.
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- W1570201598 title "Ron Gettelfinger’s Destruction of U.A.W. President Walter Reuther’s Union" @default.
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