GM Makes No Promise to Keep Van Nuys Plant Operating Beyond 1989
Officials of General Motors and the United Auto Workers held a joint news conference Friday in an attempt to dispel fears that the company’s Van Nuys assembly plant has no long-term future.
They announced that a state agency has agreed to provide $20 million in retraining funds to help improve productivity at the General Motors auto assembly plant in Van Nuys if the company agrees to keep the facility open.
“I believe this is a historic announcement concerning the future of General Motors in Van Nuys,” said Bruce Lee, Western regional director of the union, at a Los Angeles news conference.
However, the announcement fell far short of guaranteeing the factory’s future. GM officials in Los Angeles and Detroit said they could make no commitments that the plant will stay open beyond 1989, when the company plans to phase out production of the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird models at Van Nuys. “They don’t have anything beyond that,” said Darwin Allen, director of media relations for Chevrolet-Pontiac Canada, the GM division that supervises the Van Nuys plant, in a telephone interview.
“At this time, we do not have a product for Van Nuys” beyond 1989, said Ernie Schaefer, the Van Nuys plant manager, in response to a question. The long-term future of the plant, which has been in doubt since 1982, remains very much up in the air.
Provide $20 Million in Funds
Lee said the large state grant would help “set the stage” to put the Van Nuys plant “at the top of GM’s list” to get a new car.
Under the grant, the California Employment Training Panel would provide $20 million in funds to help shift the plant from a traditional assembly-line production system to a labor-management team system in which employees work as teams responsible for both assembly and quality control.
Robert C. Thierry, chairman of the Employment Training Panel, stressed that for the funds to be granted, two conditions would have to be met. GM would have to keep the plant open, and the workers who are retrained would have to keep their jobs in the factory.
Workers in Van Nuys were told late in 1982 that the plant was on an “endangered list,” primarily because its location 2,000 miles from GM’s Midwestern suppliers meant that it incurred hundreds of dollars of added shipping costs per vehicle. About 75% of the cars made there are shipped east of the Rockies.
GM officials have told union leaders that productivity will have to be improved at the plant if it is to have a long-term future, and they have been pressing for changes in production processes at Van Nuys. There are sharp internal divisions within the union about how to respond to the company’s demands.
Peter Z. Beltran, president of the UAW’s Van Nuys local, has consistently opposed modifying the contract, saying that concessions will not save the plant. He has been at the forefront of a militant campaign to utilize pressure from labor, community, religious and political organizations--including a threat of boycotting GM cars--to keep the plant open.
Today, there will be a rally at the union hall in Van Nuys demanding that GM make a commitment to keep the plant open for at least 10 more years.
In Favor of Modifying Contract
Ray Ruiz, the local’s bargaining committee chairman, said he takes a different approach than Beltran on how to prolong the plant’s life. He favors modifying the contract, including adopting a team concept of production that would be a dramatic departure from current methods used in the plant. Ruiz said Friday that he thought support for his position is growing in the local. He acknowledged that some jobs might be eliminated under the team concept. But he said the company was free to eliminate jobs now, referring to the fact that all 2,190 workers on the plant’s second shift will be laid off indefinitely June 9.
Negotiations between the union and GM officials to modify their labor agreement to bring in the team concept have been proceeding for months and will intensify next week, Lee said. He said he hoped the talks could be consummated within a week to 10 days. To change the contract and bring in the new system would require a majority vote of the local’s members.
GM officials cautioned Friday that the adoption of the team concept would not guarantee that Van Nuys would get a new car in the future.
Still, Schaefer said he is optimistic that if the team concept is adopted, the plant will have a bright future. “The key to our survival is to work together,” he said.
Schaefer said the company is considering the introduction at Van Nuys of an auto production plan known as “flex plant” that has never been used before in a U.S. auto assembly plant. This system would give the company the ability to modify production rapidly in order to make whichever car is selling best in the Western United States and thus avoid having to ship much of its product to the East.
