Fight for Seniority At GM

A remnant of the contract under which General Motors Corp.'s Spring Hill, Tenn., plant operated for almost two decades as a Saturn-only plant has left workers at GM plants from Detroit to California without the benefit of many years of corporate seniority. That is necessary to win slots on appealing shifts, lower-impact jobs and time off during prime vacation weeks.

It turns out that in addition to more than 1,000 workers in Spring Hill whom the Free Press wrote about last Sunday, there are hundreds of workers at GM plants across the country including many in Michigan lobbying the union to solve the seniority problem. They want their corporate seniority restored during the national contract talks under way between GM and the UAW.

The issue was presented at the UAW bargaining convention in March in Detroit, and workers say they believe it was included in the initial proposal to GM from the UAW in talks that began July 23. "If anything's going to happen, it's got to happen at the national level ... because this affects a whole lot more people than those people still in Tennessee," said Patrick Moore, 48, of Detroit, who worked at Saturn for six of the 22 years since he joined GM.

Because of his 1991-97 stint at Saturn, however, he is recognized as having far fewer years of seniority at his job at GM's Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly. For Monica Williams, 45, who works at Pontiac Truck, a 10-year stint at Saturn cost her 15 years of seniority in the plant, she said. So if Pontiac slows its production in response to sluggish pickup sales, she could be bumped off of her assembly-line job this year.

She is part of a group of longtime GM workers who went to Saturn for job security in the 1980s or '90s and left for other GM plants before March 2005 -- when Saturn's labor arrangement melded with the rest of GM's U.S. operations. Those workers' in-plant seniority is counted from the day they started at a non-Saturn plant.

When workers gave up seniority rights to get a job at Saturn, it was a nonissue, Williams and others said, because they all gave up their GM starting dates to get in the door at Saturn. And getting in the door often meant escaping older, traditional GM plants as the company closed them or reduced the assigned workforces.

At the time, GM ran Saturn as a separate division, with its own dealerships, its own plant and its own bargaining contract. The contract eliminated many traditional in-plant uses for union seniority. Workers rotated shifts and worked on teams on which they shared jobs.

Some workers not affected by the Saturn seniority issue favor keeping things the way they are. Many enjoy the benefits of greater seniority because of the changed rules, and others argue that older workers did what was best for the time.