UAW sees Northern plants under siege

LANSING, Mich. | United Auto Workers leaders on Friday accused Republicans of orchestrating regional warfare to kill the auto industry bailout and predicted it was the start of an effort to bust unions.

“This is almost like Confederate senators fighting against the Union Army of the North,” said Local 602 President Brian Fredline, who leads the union’s 3,000 members in Lansing, many of whom work in General Motors Corp.’s Delta Township assembly plant.

“The parallels are frightening, and it’s almost this mentality that the South will rise again,” Mr. Fredline said. “They hold hostage the economic recovery of anyone who lives north of the Mason-Dixon line,” where the Big Three automakers are headquartered.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, joined angry auto workers to take a shot primarily at Southern GOP senators for scuttling a $14 billion loan to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC intended to keep them out of bankruptcy protection.

“What do we elect these people in Congress for, if not to protect our citizens?” she said. “The Republicans in the Senate have been protecting the Republicans within their borders. I think it is astonishing. I do believe the president has to step in. He has to.”

Their anger was leveled at Sen. Bob Corker, Tennessee Republican, who led negotiations aimed at trying to get unions to renegotiate wages and benefits in exchange for the loans, along with Sen. Richard C. Shelby, Alabama Republican, and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Southern states, including Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina, are home to foreign automakers such as Mercedes, Toyota, BMW, Nissan and Hyundai, which operate without unions.

Mr. Corker knocked down the complaints, emphasizing the overall importance of the industry.

“In our state, we have General Motors, we have Nissan, and then Volkswagen also is locating in my hometown of Chattanooga. I was very involved in recruiting them here. The automobile industry is very important to our country, but it’s also incredibly important to our state,” he said.

Jonathan Graffeo, Mr. Shelby’s spokesman on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, told the Associated Press that the senator has consistently opposed taxpayer-funded bailouts.

“He opposed the Chrysler bailout in 1979 when there were no foreign auto manufacturers in Alabama, and he opposed the recent $700 billion bailout of the banking industry,” Mr. Graffeo said.

Gerald Meyers, the former chairman and CEO of American Motors Corp. and now a crisis management consultant to business, said the union has itself to blame for the position it is in. He calls the suggestion that if one U.S. automaker fails, the others will tumble in swift succession “absurd.”

Mr. Meyers, an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor, said he thinks the executive, legislative and judicial branches need to stay out of the union negotiations and allow the interested parties to come to the table and bargain. He thinks the volume needs to be turned down on current negotiations, which he says have quickly gotten out of hand.

“I think the political interference has been nothing but muddying the waters and making the interested parties feel like they have power they don’t have,” he said, adding that while organized labor was useful in assisting the middle class across nearly every American sector, their current costs are too overwhelming and have made them unaffordable in today’s economic climate.

At a 10 a.m. news conference Friday in Detroit, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger accused Republicans of orchestrating a union-busting approach in the Senate’s failure to approve the bailout, citing a GOP e-mail he claimed to have acquired.

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