CLEVELAND (AP) -- The president of the United Steelworkers of America is using the unusual bargaining tactic of cooperation to reach breakthrough collective-bargaining agreements and retain jobs.þþFaced with the threat of job losses and plant closings, Leo Gerard shifted tactics in negotiating with International Steel Group of Cleveland and U.S. Steel of Pittsburgh. The Steelworkers accepted rule changes that reduced the work force, but in exchange got a stronger voice in the mills and in strategic business decisions such as plant investments.þþ``He's reaching accommodation with the realities of the global market and trying to save what can be saved of the American steel industry,'' said Charles McCollester, president of the Pennsylvania Labor History Society.þþGerard, 57, started his career at 18 in a fiery nickel smelter in Sudbury, Ontario.þþTo the casual observer, Gerard fits the part of a steelworker with his lumbering build and straight-talking language. But he has steered his union through profound changes with the finesse of a politician.þþLike United Automobile Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, Gerard is head of a union battered by foreign and nonunion U.S. competition.þþThat's pushing their organizations to be less militant than the Service Employees International Union, which represents janitors, nurses, guards and other unions that have so far escaped global pressures.þþ``There's a feeling from Gerard and Gettelfinger that they want to present themselves as the labor statesmen, the realists,'' said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.þþIn Cleveland, ISG shrank union job categories from 32 to five, freeing the company from rigid limits on redeploying workers. But the contract approved last February also required ISG to cut layers of management between the chief executive and the shop floor from seven to three.þþIncreased flexibility allowed ISG to cut the employee hours required to produce a ton of steel from 2 1/2 to one. The union gained more control over day-to-day operation of the mills.þþA few years back, such togetherness was unthinkable. The perilous state of the industry changed that.þþ``It's not just a matter of fighting it out, because if you use that approach, you're likely to lose the whole game -- not just the battle, but the war,'' said Paul Gerhart, professor of labor and human-resource policy at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management. ``Interests are not so clearly defined as they used to be.''þþContract negotiations involving manufacturing giants outside steel -- Ford, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors and Goodyear -- also show a new willingness by unions and owners to smooth over differences to slow the movement of industrial production offshore.þþThe new partnership between the Steelworkers and surviving steel companies hardly means they see eye-to-eye on everything.þþGerard says bosses at some mills ``still think they're living under old agreements, trying to get away with what they can get away with. We have to deal with that. We're the union still.''þþHe also is quick to note that ISG was a special case: It involved mills that had been idled for six months, workers with benefits gutted by bankruptcy and a new owner who had no prior obligations to the union.þþ``It was a divergence,'' Gerard said. Nonetheless, he adds, ``The reality is, we needed a new labor-management dynamic.''þþ
Source: NY Times
