United Auto Workers Vice President Joe Ashton told reporters today that the union would be open to negotiating lower pay levels if General Motors restored its idled assembly plants in Janesville, Wisconsin, and Spring Hill, Tennessee.
“We will look at anything when it comes to negotiations that will retain jobs,” Ashton told reporters gathered today at a GM plant in Orion Township, Michigan. Ashton said that the UAW would consider letting GM pay entry-level wages to workers if it reopened the plants.
Ashton was at the Orion plant to tout the UAW’s agreement to a two-tier wage system that GM says will allow it to build small cars at a profit in the U.S. As a result, GM will be the only automaker to build a subcompact vehicle – the Chevrolet Sonic – in the United States. Subcompacts don’t offer automakers much profit margin compared to larger, more expensive vehicles.
Ashton said that he believes it is likely that GM will seek to reopen the two plants it shuttered in 2008, but a GM spokesperson suggested otherwise.
“There is no product demand for them to fulfill right now,” GM VP of Labor Relations, Cathy Clegg, said. “Absolutely we would like to be able to have demand for our products such that we would be able to turn those plants back on.”
Clegg reiterated that GM still plans to shut down its Shreveport, Louisiana, plant in 2012, when it phases out the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon pickup trucks.
“We differ on Shreveport,” Ashton said, stating that he doesn’t think GM will reopen it. “But we still feel GM has an obligation to those employees. If there’s something we can put in that facility, then it should be put in there.”
GM’s Janesville Assembly once built the automaker’s GMT900 full-size SUVs (Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, among others), but the automaker chose to consolidate production at its Arlington, Texas, plant. In Spring Hill, GM still builds engines, but its vehicle assembly facility is inactive. Opened to much fanfare in the early 1990s, it once served as the exclusive Saturn plant before building various GM crossovers before GM moved some production to Mexico (Saturn Vue) and Michigan (Chevrolet Traverse).
References
1.’UAW vying for…’ view
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