UAW, GM discuss pay scheme tied to productivity and profits

[Hannah Bell]

The United Auto Workers is currently in discussions with General Motors and the other Detroit automakers about replacing standardized wages with an incentive system that would tie each worker’s pay to productivity, quality improvements and profits.

If implemented, the pay scheme would overturn one of the most basic gains won by the UAW in the first half of the last century, when it abolished the hated piecework system and established hourly wage rates guaranteed by a union contract.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “GM wants more flexible pay levels for workers as a way to encourage better performance and avoid locking the company into handing out big pay raises when the company isn’t performing well, company executives say.”

The UAW is now negotiating the terms for a return to conditions not seen in the factories in three-quarters of a century. One of the most central demands of the Flint sit-down strikers who forced GM to sign the first contract with the UAW in 1937 was the abolition of piecework in favor of straight hourly rates.

What were conditions before then?

The web site of UAW Local 72 in Kenosha, Wisconsin gives a flavor of conditions inside the Nash (later Chrysler) plant before piecework was abolished by the mass struggle of workers in 1943:

“The pace of work burned out workers by the time they turned 40 years old. At model changeover time, these older, worn-out employees were cast aside in favor of younger, quicker men who were kept on. Armies of unemployed young men spawned by the Great Depression gathered each day outside the plant, desperate for work; they stood ready to take the jobs of any who would stand up against the company’s unfair treatment. The workers inside, equally desperate to keep their jobs, would bribe foremen with gifts ranging from fruit and vegetables to Prohibition bootleg whiskey.”

In 1932, workers were paid (48 cents an hour or $7.50 an hour in 2009 dollars) “only when cars actually passed a work group’s work station on the assembly line. When the line stopped for repairs or because of production bottlenecks outside the workers’ control, the pay stopped too.”

Under the piecework system, when production hit peak periods employees could wind up working as much as 18 hours a day at straight time. What overtime pay there was typically went to the foreman’s favorites. Once peak production periods ended, the work week shrank to as little as 18 hours. For the entire year of 1932, according to his W-2 form, worker Lawrence Michel of Department 833, Final Assembly, earned a paltry $282.31 ($4,367.03 in 2009 dollars).”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/auto-j13.shtml