Workers at Fuyao reject UAW
Union supporters cite vote’s ‘shocking margin’ of defeat.
Some union support-MORAINE — ers said Friday they were shocked by results that showed employees at Fuyao Glass America overwhelmingly voted down joining the United Auto Workers.
Defeating the UAW’s more than 18-month attempt to organize one of the Dayton area’s fastest growing manufacturers on Thursday during the union vote will hurt the national labor organization in future negotiations, one expert said.
The final tally after a day and a half of voting at the Moraine factory was 886-441 against forming a UAW-represented
bargaining unit, according to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversaw the election.
There were 1,608 eligible voters at Fuyao, according to Matthew Denholm, assistant regional director for the NLRB in Cincinnati. Three ballots were void and 186 were challenged.
Fuyao worker Jeremy Grant, a UAW supporter, said he was surprised by the approximately 2-to-1 margin against the union.
“It was fairly shocking,” Grant said. “We were really confident.”
“I thought that the UAW and Fuyao workers could come together and make for a better company,” he added.
The NLRB election process gives the UAW a week to challenge the outcome of the election. In a state- ment, the union said work- ers “reported irregularities during the election which the UAW is investigating, and it may file objections” with the NLRB.
The UAW did not spec- ify what those “irregular- ities” were, and a spokeswoman for the union said there would be no comment Friday.
“It is disheartening to know that in 2017 there are companies willing to do so much to deny workers a voice and fair treatment,” Rich Rankin, director UAW Region 2B said in a state- ment late Thursday. “Unfortunately, that is what these brave workers faced when all they have asked for is a fair path to helping this manufacturer produce the best products and live up to their commitments it made to the Dayton community.”
Fuyao is Ohio’s largest Chi- nese-owned manufacturing operation, anchored in a former General Motors plant, and the company itself is just over three years old. The Moraine plant makes auto- motive and safety glass, with the capacity to make glass sets for one of every four vehicles on North American roads.
“We are pleased that (Fuyao) associates chose to maintain a direct relation- ship with our company and resist the union’s attempt to intervene,” Fuyao President Jeff Dao chuan Liu said in a statement released. “While we respect our employees’ right to support or reject a union, we also admire their courage to reject this union’s desperate attempt to prop up its revenue in the face of declining union membership worldwide.
F. Vincent Vernuccio — a senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan — touched on a theme that U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, recently raised: The lingering suspicion that the UAW played a role, with General Motors, in the 2008 closing of the plant that Fuyao now calls home.
GM closed that plant, then an SUV assembly operation, in late 2008. At the time, it was GM’s only plant represented by the IUE-CWA, a union competing with the UAW for blue-collar members.
Neither the UAW nor GM have ever openly acknowledged any back-room deal to close the Moraine plant.
“Given the union’s recent and past legacy of alleged corruption — not to mention its history of selling out workers in Moraine — it’s no surprise that plant workers said ‘No thank you’ to the UAW,” Vernuccio said.
Jim Clark, president of the IUE-CWA, said the vote was a clear “no” to the UAW, but he doesn’t feel the vote was necessarily a rejection of all unions.
Asked if the IUE-CWA will try to organize the plant, Clark said he and fellow IUE leaders will assess that.
Greg Lawson, a policy ana- lyst for the conservative-leaning Buckeye Institute, said generally companies are trying to be responsive to workers while workforce protection rules perhaps offer workers greater security.
Workers feel they have “legal recourse in a lot of these cases, and now you have rules and regulations that are very protective of workers, regardless of whether they’re in a union or not,” Lawson said.
For well over a year, organizers for the UAW have worked to get a foothold at the West Stroop plant.
The union hoped to stem a decades long-decline in membership, down to about 416,000 members nationally today, well under a height of about 1.5 million in 1979.
Joe Allen, a historian and writer on labor issues, said in an interview before results were announced that a UAW loss in Moraine would be “devastating” for the union.
“When the UAW can’t organize an auto parts plant in Ohio ... then what does the future hold for an auto union?” Allen said.
On Friday, Allen said: “Obviously, this is a devastating loss. This is rais- ing some serious existential questions about the future of the UAW.”
Allen said the chief leaders of the UAW are not cho- sen by ordinary workers and members, and the union per- haps should reconsider that.
“The biggest barrier is a lack of democracy,” he said. “The top leaders in the UAW are not elected by the rank and file. They’re elected basically by a club of officers. Clearly, that caucus has proven itself to be completely bankrupt.”