Challenger Loses By Slim Margin : Fight for Union Position Highlights Split in UAW

Carroll Butler, a veteran aerospace worker from Grand Prairie, Tex., considers the United Auto Workers “the greatest union in the country” and has been a staunch supporter of virtually all of its principal leaders for the 26 years that he has been a member.

But this year, Butler and a number of his Southwestern colleagues decided to buck the UAW administration in hopes of making a first step in changing the union’s course. Butler said the union needed to take a more sophisticated and aggressive approach to collective bargaining, organizing and political activity. “Some of the leaders of this union have forgotten where they came from,” Butler said. “We hope the whole international will listen to us.”

On Wednesday, they fell short of that goal by the tiniest of margins. In the only suspenseful event at the union’s convention in Anaheim, Butler’s candidate, Jerry Tucker, fell one-tenth of a vote shy of unseating Tucker’s former boss, Ken Worley, who has been the director of the union’s Southwestern region, based in St. Louis, for 19 years. (Each local has a certain number of votes, based on the size of its membership, leading in some cases to fractional votes.)

The race had been closely watched by the delegates here because Tucker’s campaign raised questions about how well the union is responding to the challenges that confront it and what its future course will be.

In distinct contrast, Worley, 62, who has been on the union’s executive board for 19 years, said he was “a team player” who backed all of the policies of the current administration.

He ran with the strong support of all the union’s top leaders, including President Owen Bieber. On Tuesday afternoon, Bieber briefly wore a Worley campaign jacket while on stage during the convention. And numerous members of the union’s international staff lobbied vigorously on his behalf.

Bieber and the rest of the union’s top leaders faced no opposition for reelection Wednesday. But they were quite worried about the Tucker-Worley race in Region 5, the union’s largest, spanning eight states from Colorado to Louisiana.

Tucker had pledged to pay more attention to the voice of rank-and-file members and bring renewed activism and “new directions” to the union.

Butler and a group of other officials from Region 5, who had urged Tucker to run, call themselves the New Directions Movement. They sent out a letter last January questioning some of the international union’s current policies and its “failure to work with our local unions.”

They held a meeting of 125 concerned local leaders in Oklahoma City on March 1. The group issued a report calling for new directions in collective bargaining, more aggressive activity in organizing and political action and greater use of computers to increase unionwide communication and to help them counter hostile firms.

Many of Tucker’s backers, including several union local presidents from Missouri and Texas, said he had helped them in various battles, ranging from a 15-month struggle to ward off concession demands from the aerospace division of giant LTV Corp. in Texas to the servicing of small locals whose members work for independent auto parts suppliers.

Good Tactician

Tucker’s supporters described him as a sophisticated, aggressive leader who could bring new vibrancy to the regional directors’ job and perhaps shake up the union’s executive board.

In particular, they said he was a good tactician who had designed a strategy of workplace slowdowns and other activities called “running the plant backward” that had played a critical role in the LTV battle and two other successful efforts to fight off concessions in recent years.

Butler, the president of the local at LTV, said Tucker provided a creative alternative in a situation where the union didn’t want to give in but where it would have been “suicidal to strike.”

In interviews, numerous New Directions supporters also criticized the union’s top leadership for taking too accommodating a stance toward auto and aerospace companies in an effort to save jobs.

“We’ve got people up there like Donald Ephlin (head of the union’s General Motors Department) who believe they can get in bed with the corporation and work with the corporation to help themselves eliminate our people, eliminate our jobs, cause constant fear inside the plants and not really listen to what the membership has to say to them anymore,” said Claude Thornton, president of a UAW local at a GM plant in Kansas City, Mo. “We’re trying to tell the international they have to do things differently.”

In contrast, Worley’s backers said he has helped keep the union on a steady course in a very difficult era for organized labor and that no big change was warranted.

“Worley’s a tried and proven leader,” said John Nolan, a benefits representative for a Tulsa, Okla., local. “There’s no reason to change. Ken Worley understands that there (have) to be, of necessity, changes that accommodate companies in the auto industry,” Nolan said. “The old ways are not adequate to meet new challenges. We better make changes or we’ll lose jobs.”

He indicated that he thought Tucker’s supporters want to go back to an era that never can be recaptured.

Charlie Johnson, the bargaining committee chairman of Local 93 in Kansas City, Mo., and a Tucker backer, said he recognized the current dilemmas facing the union and the need for change.

In particular, Johnson said, GM was attempting to pit one local against another by making threats that if a plant does not make concessions, there may be a shutdown and another plant will get the work. That charge was denied by Ephlin. He has become the focus of criticism that the union does not have a clear strategy for dealing with the world’s largest auto maker.

“I don’t see that we have a problem with so-called whipsawing,” Ephlin said in an interview. Worley said he backed current union approaches.

Tucker said he was committed to “hands-on” support of local unions in collective bargaining, including the development of intra-corporation bargaining strategies that would not permit the pitting of one local against another.

Earlier this week, the New Directions group distributed its March 1 report in brochure form to all of the delegates. “We believe the UAW faces its deepest crisis in nearly 50 years. We are losing our work, losing our wage and benefit protections and risk losing the support of our membership,” the report said.

The report stressed that its authors were not part of a perennial group of dissidents who constantly criticize the union’s top officers. “All of us have been consistent supporters of the top UAW leadership in the past. We feel we have earned the right to be constructively critical. We do not intend to be taken for granted, and we want leadership accountability. . . . We want new directions.”

The race was hard fought and frequently bitter. Delegates from the two sides sat at the same tables near the front of the convention hall and maintained an uneasy truce during the day that often broke down into shouting matches in hotel lobbies at night.

At the meeting where the vote was held Wednesday, Bieber acknowledged how tense the situation had become.

“After this campaign is over, this region has to get back together,” Bieber said. “We’re not going to see this tear up the membership. . . . We’re going to take care of the members of this region.”

Some of Tucker’s backers had charged that they had been threatened with reprisals if they did not come over to Worley.

Worley said he was “happy” about his win. Tucker had been fired from his job as Worley’s assistant after he declared his candidacy last month. Under the union constitution, UAW officials said, a staff member has to announce if he is going to oppose an incumbent at least 90 days in advance of an election.

Butler said he would continue to push for change in the union. “We need to develop a more sophisticated approach to dealing with the corporations,” he said.