New UAW president soft-spoken, but tough

Associated Press

DETROIT — He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t swear, doesn’t say a lot in public, but Ron Gettelfinger is known as an honest, tough-talking bargainer who doesn’t bend to pressure.

"He’s a great floor politician, great at talking to people face to face but not exactly a media person," said Sean McAlinden, a labor expert with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.

On Wednesday the mustached man with the soft southeastern Indiana accent and hard-nosed negotiating style is expected to be elected president of the United Auto Workers at the union’s constitutional convention in Las Vegas.

He’ll succeed Stephen Yokich, who is retiring after two terms.

"His heart is always doing what’s right for the membership. It might not be good for 100 percent of them but he’ll do what’s right for the majority," said Rocky Comito, who heads UAW Local 862, the Louisville, Ky., local to which Gettelfinger has belonged since 1964.

Gettelfinger, 57, is currently a UAW vice president leading the union’s National Ford Department.

Perhaps Gettelfinger’s biggest achievement in that position was negotiating contract provisions for union members working at Visteon Corp. before the former Ford parts subsidiary was spun off.

Under the contract, workers at Visteon will remain Ford employees for life, with Ford paychecks and pensions. Once Visteon became independent, those workers were free to transfer back and forth between Ford and Visteon.

"This contract represents excellent progress for UAW Ford families and delivers full protection for our members who work at Visteon now and in the future," Gettelfinger said in October 1999 when the contract with Ford was ratified.

Gettelfinger started in 1964 as a chassis line repairman at Ford’s Louisville Assembly plant.

He cut his negotiating teeth as chairman of the local bargaining committee, bargaining committeeman and delegate to a subcouncil of the UAW national Ford council.

Gettelfinger served as president and chairman of his local bargaining committee for the 1984 and 1987 talks. In 1987 he earned a seat at the bargaining table as part of the UAW-Ford national negotiating committee.

He was elected a UAW vice president in 1998 and assigned to head its Ford department. Gettelfinger also is director of the union’s aerospace department and chaplaincy program.

Gettelfinger is virtually assured election because he is the nominee of the UAW’s powerful administrative caucus. Every one of the caucus’s presidential nominees has won since the caucus was established in 1946.

The caucus announced its nominations last November, giving the membership time to coalesce around the presumed new president and other slate mates and providing Gettelfinger an opportunity to decide assignments on the 19-member executive board.

Gettelfinger will have to spend the next year preparing for contract talks with the Big Three automakers. The current four-year pact expires in September 2003.

Holding onto union jobs just as the Big Three are attempting to reduce manufacturing capacity will be a priority.

Gettelfinger takes over at a time when the union is not only fighting to hang onto jobs, but fighting to rebuild a membership base that’s dwindled over the last 30 years to just over 700,000.

Former UAW president Douglas Fraser says Gettelfinger must also focus on organizing workers at U.S. plants operated by foreign automakers, the so-called transplants. So far the union has failed at every attempt to do so.

"He must view with alarm the situation we’re in and I know he’s very conscious of that," Fraser said.

Gettelfinger is likely to get off to a smooth start, with no organized dissent expected at the convention and no serious announced rivals for the union’s top spot.

"That’s what the last six months were for," said McAlinden. "He found their happiness points and who needs to be accommodated."