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Author
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Topic: Eight Hours is Enough!
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robbie_dee
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 195
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posted 01 February 2005 02:13 PM
quote:
Hourly employees at Ford Motor Co.'s Windsor, Ontario, engine plant have unanimously voted to forgo lucrative overtime in an effort to force the automaker to recall laid-off workers. Nearly 330 members of Canadian Auto Workers Local 200 are on layoff, and Ford had plans to idle 100 more workers next month. Those plans now are on hold, said Mike Vince, president of Local 200, which represents 5,000 workers at the engine complex. "We're trying to get the company and some of our members off 12-hour workdays, seven days a week," Vince said. The vote to refuse voluntary overtime came after laid-off workers made a plea to active workers in a union meeting last week. Even though laid-off employees collect 60 percent of their wages while off work, some are having trouble paying mortgages and other bills as a result of the layoffs that date to May 2004.
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We've got people in some areas who are working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, constant," Vince said. "And still we have people on layoff, both in production and skilled trades. We've said to the corporation, this is unacceptable."
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It's rare for union workers to refuse overtime, but it's not unprecedented. Overtime is a delicate matter for many workers and union leaders. In some union locals, leaders who have boycotted overtime have been ousted at election time because workers who put in 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, can earn as much as $160,000 a year. But some Local 200 members support a cut in overtime in order to recall workers. "The bills are piling up on people," said John Mancina, a 51-year-old Ford worker with 21 years' seniority. "Eight hours is enough."
Detroit News, Sunday Jan. 30, 2005 CAW Local 1200 Web Site On an earlier thread we were discussing how unions represented junior employees as opposed to more senior ones. Well I think this here is a great example of solidarity between senior and junior employees. The overtime premiums the senior employees could have had were significant. But it's not right when so many other bargaining unit members are off work. In the end, working fewer hours will be better for the senior employees, too, because it means more time with their families and less safety risk from exhaustion. [ 01 February 2005: Message edited by: robbie_dee ]
From: Iron City | Registered: Apr 2001
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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
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posted 05 February 2005 06:02 PM
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Originally posted by Michelle:
Oh! Apologies then, Fidel.
No need to apologize. I should have said something like, "those jokers in management" or something. Damn my typing. And mother paid for all those books, too.  But if the big car companies didn't have to pay big money to big health insurance companies, each with their bloated CEO salaries and management bureaucracies duplicated times every HMO and predatory insurance company, just think how Ford and GM could compete with Asian car companies that don't have to worry about their workers accessing health care ?. Imagine the possibility for adding more full time workers at Ford with a reduced need to squeeze worker's for higher profit margins if one national health plan were in place instead of the fragmented, inefficient system of privatisation they have now. In theory, private sector services cannot compete with less expensive nationalised entitities run at cost to produce. And in case anyone thought the same, we all needed to pay trillions for two world wars and a cold war to prove otherwise. But what the Yanks have now sure is glitzy. Expensive but glitzy. The Yanks need socalized medicine in the worst way. There are anywhere from 42 to 72 million reasons for it. Instead, what they get is socialized banking and corporate welfare state. [ 05 February 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004
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