UAW-Caterpillar contract “highlights” reveal new attacks on jobs and wages
By
Marcus Day
24 March 2017
Yesterday morning, the United Auto Workers union released the “highlights” flyer of its tentative agreement with Caterpillar, the construction and mining equipment giant. Although the document is an attempt to present the six-year contract proposal in the best possible light, it nevertheless reveals major givebacks to the company.
Caterpillar workers should reject the UAW’s attempt to stampede them into accepting yet another sellout contract at ratification meetings scheduled for Sunday, March 26. They have a right to see and study the full contract before any vote takes place, including all “letters of understanding” and other memoranda used to hide the real content of the deal.
While the UAW claimed to have reached the six-year agreement over a week ago, on March 15, it has refused to release the full contract to workers. The UAW executives apparently intended to withhold their “highlights” flyer until the votes themselves, and only agreed to release it a few days early after facing angry questions from workers on social media and elsewhere over the weekend.
As the document makes clear, the union’s only reason for keeping the full contract from workers is that they are afraid it would provoke even more explosive opposition than the highlights already have.
It begins with a letter from Norwood Jewell, the UAW vice president who was the architect of concessions agreements at both Fiat-Chrysler and John Deere in 2015. Seeking to lower workers’ expectations at the outset and justify the abysmal character of the document’s contents, he writes, “During the course of 2017 negotiations, your UAW Caterpillar National Policy Committee was…