“They’re laying people off and scattering them to the winds to find employment”
GM layoffs of 1,300 workers at Detroit assembly plant
By
a reporting team
4 March 2017
Thirteen hundred workers lost their jobs Friday when General Motors phased out the second shift at its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. The layoffs are a major blow to workers and to the city, which is already the poorest big city in America with an official unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent and a real jobless rate much higher.
While some workers have enough seniority to transfer to other plants, many losing their jobs were temporary workers promised by GM and the United Auto Workers (UAW) that they would be turned into full-time, permanent workers. Now, less than a year after being hired onto the new shift to meet increased demand, they are being laid off, months, if not weeks, short of qualifying for transfers and supplemental unemployment benefits. Medical coverage will be terminated at the end of the month.
Neither the national nor local news media covered the layoffs. President Trump and Detroit Mayor Duggan, a Democrat who has touted the “comeback of the city,” did not say a word about the loss of 1,300 jobs. As for the UAW—which has a 9.4 percent ownership stake in GM and a seat on its board of directors—it was silent on the layoffs, sending out a text instead quoting a 1970 speech by former union president Walter Reuther saying, “This union is not about Solidarity House; it is not about your local union headquarters; this union is about the men and women that we represent.”
The UAW forced through a contract in 2015 that expanded the use of lower-paid temporary workers to facilitate layoffs such as these. The world’s third largest automaker made $12 billion in pre-tax…