Any salaried worker being a union member is almost a contradiction in terms...I can't help but wonder if those "union members" desired to belong to the UAW or if they were forced to belong as part of the settlement of a contract dispute???

 

Some are.
Even the receptionist at the front desk is a union member.

 

This I disagree with. If anything trucks and the corvette might be scaled back in design, but they are still great sellers and money makers. Sure they might drop the Z06 or the ZR1, but I don't see how they could afford to drop the whole line.

 

I better order a few ACDelco opti sparks.

 

Not at all.
They all voted by an overwhelming margin to be in the union.

 

Overwhelming?

Care to back that up with some published (as in independently verifiable) numbers as in X voted yes out of Y total votes?

 

Why would you want that? I guess the quality dept, receptionists, accountants, etc wouldn't matter, but I wouldn't think you would want engineering being made up of represented employees...seems like it would be a conflict of interest, especially in regards to maintenance and skilled trades. Are the maintenance supervisors and staff UAW as well?

 

I've never known the union to publish their vote results, ESPECIALLY of a vote to organize. Nor are they not independently verifiable because they do everything in-house.

Furthermore, it's nobody's business what the vote is except for the people and company directly involved.

 

Why WOULDN'T you want that?

Why would an engineer being unionized be a conflict of interest? They're not management. As a matter of fact, the product engineers at my last plant came EXTREMELY close to joining our local but the new owner gave them a large bonus to not join and the effort just barely failed because of that.

Maintenance staff is union as are skilled trades. Management is not.

 

I figured skilled trades would be. I would think plant engineering would want to be non-rep, otherwise all the work would go to the union when it could be cheaper to have contractors come in. The same could be said for the maintenance staff. Engineering and the union tend to get into conflicts about farm-outs, even if the job is cheaper/better for contractors.

 

If you'll check, you'll find it wasn't me who claimed an "overwhelming majority"! And, if it's "nobody's business"; whey did you bring it up?

It rather leaves the rest of us, or at least me, to conclude that you either don't really know or you know but shouldn't be talking about it anyway since it's "nobody's business"!

Forgive me for being skeptical but in the last UAW vote I was privy too (which was a vote to organize), the UAW, which lost, claimed to the press that the vote was "close" even though the workers voted by more than 3 to 1 against...if that's "close" in the UAW's reality then I suspect that an "overwhelming majority" is probably more likely 50% plus 1.

 

For one reason, because most professionals don't want to be in a union...because most professionals desire to negotiate their own salary...negotiate what they are worth...not what some union decides the "group" is worth.

If an engineer or system's designer's work is worth $150K/year in the marketplace, why would they want some third party to tell them they only get $80k/year because that's all the group is worth?

 

The trucks just got a brand-new design, and since the sales are dropping off and models are getting re-assigned to different platforms, it'll likely be a while before activity picks up again.

In the event of a bankruptcy or bailout, the Vette is going to be rather low on the list of priorities. I don't like that fact (especially since it has professional consequences), but I think that's the way it's going to be. Hopefully I'm wrong...

 

I brought it up because some people thought it was odd to have a salaried union. I wanted to show that even salaried people want to be in a union.

I don't know the actual numbers. Never said I did. I wasn't employed with the company at the sime the salaried people joined. BUT, because it wasn't that long ago (late '80s), I worked with MANY people that were there at the time. And from all the people I talked to, I did not get the impression that many people voted against it. As a matter of fact, it sounded like workers pushed hard for it. I never found one person who voted against it.

 

I don't really think there's much negotiating. There are job grades with narrow salary bands, even for salaried, non-union employees. The position you're hired for falls into a job grade with it's salary band. These bands may cover a few thousand dollar swing, but a new hire is not going in there and negotiating what they're going to pay him. Nor is a current employee going to his boss and asking for more money. They get regular raises. If they want a significant raise, they'll have to prove themselves worthy of a promotion to a higher pay grade, and then go after that promotion.
If a new hire didn't like what the company wants to pay, or a current employee wants more money for the same job, well, the answer to that is "find another job then".