Portland, OR
One of the largest U.S. manufacturing contract expirations in 1997 involves 14 unions at General Electric, which had profits last year of $7.28 billion, most likely the highest in the history of the world when all are reported.
The unions bargain together as the Coordinated Bargaining Committee. For more than 50 years, collective bargaining at General Electric has resulted in U.S. workers, the most productive on earth, building an enormously successful enterprise. Those workers have created fabulous wealth for corporate executives and large stockholders.
Now, however, the CBC unions are being subjected to reckless, anti-union comments by John F. Welch, Jr., the Chief Executive Officer of General Electric. In videotaped remarks distributed throughout the company in an attempt to intimidate workers and their unions five months before contract expiration, Welch challenged the fundamental right of U.S. unions to exist.
"We don't need some third party to give people voice and dignity," Welch said on the tape. "We are the best prepared company in the world to take a strike."
After some gratuitous insults to the Big Three auto companies, who "accepted all those crazy demands that are noncompetitive," Welch introduced three topics -- which he says are the union goals -- "30 and Out" pensions, limits on outsourcing and neutrality in organizing. Welch declared:
"Three of the things they are talking about are not for us and are not for us in any way." Then, having declared his refusal to bargain on three important issues, Welch rides herd on GE plant managers in what may be a record in union-busting, even in the 1990s era of threats and "permanent" replacements:
"You better get prepared like you have never been prepared. We are going to look at it monthly. We get monthly updates from the CEOs of the businesses as to how you are going to operate. We'll show the world how we can operate in a strike and not flinch if that's what happens."
There hasn't been a nationwide strike at General Electric since 1969, a strike caused by the last vestiges of "Boulwarism," a GE management posture not unlike Welch's current refusal to bargain. The long struggle against GE and Boulwarism left the unions with a sense of solidarity that has prevailed in the multi-union bargaining for more than a quarter of a century since.
This Executive Council has ample reason to believe that reaction to Welch now among the 46,000 union workers at GE is the same as it was to Boulware. Welch's attitude has made the 1997 GE bargaining a center point of concern for workers, union and non-union alike, who know that wage earners are on an economic treadmill. CEOs like Welch, on the other hand, reward themselves with salaries like Welch's $22 million in 1995. Clearly, GE and Welch are not "bringing good things to life."
The AFL-CIO will make certain that those workers have the support they need to turn back this attack on their right to band together and bargain collectively for the common good.
Representatives of the affected workers have already met with officers and staff of the AFL-CIO Strategic Approaches Committee, which will tap the federation's new corporate and investment strategies in support of GE workers.
The AFL-CIO will lend its support to the CBC in holding GE accountable to the American public. General Electric has a responsibility to use the Company's enormous wealth to provide secure jobs, good wages and better retirement benefits for GE's workforce, without an unnecessary and costly dispute.
The AFL-CIO is determined to put the full resources of the American labor movement and such worldwide worker organizations as the International Metal Workers Federation (IMF) behind this effort to preserve and expand GE's unionized workforce. To this end, we call on affiliated unions, state and local AFL-CIOs, and all constituent and allied groups within the U.S. labor community to leave no task undone in mobilizing support for the GE workers until they win a fair contract from General Electric.