American labor union activist (1929–2020)
Owen Frederick Bieber (; December 28, 1929 – February 17, 2020) was an American labor union activist. He was president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) from 1983 to 1995.
Born in Michigan, Bieber joined the McInerney Spring and Wire Company, an automotive parts supplier in Grand Rapids, after finishing high school. His father was also employed at the company, and had co-founded a UAW local there. Bieber himself became active within the local, rising from shop steward to its president between 1949 and 1956. In 1961 he became a part-time union organizer for the UAW's international union and retired as president of the local a year later, to work full-time for the international UAW. In 1980 he was elected as the head of the UAW's General Motors Department.
After a hotly contested election in 1983, he was chosen to head the union in October of that year. His time as president of the union was marked by support of several political causes, including the boycott against South African apartheid and opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement. He oversaw the union during the shrinking of the automobile manufacturing industry in the US, and led them through a number of tense negotiations with the Big Three automobile manufacturers that included strikes and other labor action. While he set a goal of adding new union members throughout his presidency, he largely failed as union organizing efforts at Honda and Nissan plants were defeated. His presidency also saw the splintering of his own union, with the Canadian division breaking off to form its own independent organization (the Canadian Auto Workers), amid deep internal divisions which developed throughout his term. He retired from the UAW in 1995.
Early life and career.
Owen F. Bieber was born in December 1929 to Albert F. and Minnie (Schwartz) Bieber in the hamlet of North Dorr, Dorr Township, Allegan County, Michigan. His father was of German descent and an autoworker at McInerney Spring and Wire Company (an automotive parts supplier) who had co-founded UAW Local 687. It was the first UAW local organized within the city limits of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The family were devout Roman Catholics, and Bieber attended Visitation Elementary School (a two-room school) and Catholic Central High School in nearby Grand Rapids. As a child, he worked pulling weeds in onion and celery fields. He graduated from high school in 1948, and in July of that year took a job at McInerney Spring and Wire as a wire bender, making seats for Cadillac and Hudson cars. "You had to bend 8- and 9-gauge spring wire, sometimes five wires at a time. Those Hudsons, they had a seat four miles long ... It was a hard job. After the first hour in there, I felt like just leaving. If my father hadn't worked there, too, I probably would've", he later said.
Bieber married his high school sweetheart, the former Shirley M. Van Woerkom, on November 25, 1950, and the couple had three sons (all of them became autoworkers) and two daughters. They maintained a home in North Dorr as well as Southfield.
Although his wire bending job was supposed to be only summer employment, Bieber stayed and did not go on to college. Bieber was elected a shop steward of Local 687 (which covered Grand Rapids and most of the immediate surrounding area) in 1949, and in 1951 was elected to the local's executive board. He was elected to Local 687's collective bargaining committee in 1955, and became the local's president in 1956. In 1961, he became a part-time union organizer for the international union. Bieber retired as Local 687's president in 1962, and took a full-time position as an international representative and organizer with the UAW. He worked closely with Kenneth W. Robinson, the director of UAW Region 1D (then the largest region in the international union). Robinson promoted Bieber to servicing representative in 1964, and made him his personal aide.
On December 18, 1972, Robinson appointed Bieber assistant director of Region 1D after the incumbent, Charles Rogers, was diagnosed with cancer and stepped down. In 1974, Robinson stepped down as director of Region 1D due to ill health. Bieber was elected as his successor, and held the position until 1980.
GM Department director.
In 1980, Bieber won election as vice president of the General Motors Department of the UAW. Irving Bluestone, who had led the GM Department since 1970, had retired. The UAW Steering Committee (a body of about 400 local union presidents) unanimously endorsed Bieber for the position. Also nominated for vice president slots were Donald Ephlin, Ray Majerus, and Stephen Yokich. Bieber won the election at the UAW's national convention in June 1980, receiving the highest number of votes of any candidate.
Bieber was GM Department director for just two and a half years, but negotiated a historic contract with General Motors (GM) in 1982. The early 1980s recession and competition from Japanese automakers had cut very deeply into GM's market share, and the company had laid off more than 140,000 of its 330,000 production workers (roughly half its workforce). UAW membership had fallen to 1.2 million from a peak of 1.5 million in 1979. In March 1981, nine months after Bieber became GM Department head, GM asked the union to reopen its contract and negotiation concessions but the union refused. In November 1981, however, GM began using its worker participation program to convince its unionized employees to reopen their contract. Bieber strongly criticized the company for generating "distrust of the U.A.W. leadership", "spoonfeed[ing]" a "captive audience", and perverting the worker participation program into a means to "propagandize or parrot the current views of the chairman of the board of G.M. as to how to save G.M. through worker sacrifice." But behind the scenes, UAW president Douglas Fraser, Bieber, and others were secretly already talking with GM about reopening the contract. The union agreed to enter into talks in January 1982, hoping to win job security commitments for its members in exchange for wage and benefit concessions. The decision was a historic one, as it was only the second time in UAW history that the union had agreed to reopen a contract. It was historic as well as it was the first concessionary contract the union had negotiated.
In April 1982, UAW members approved the concessionary contract Bieber negotiated. Initially, GM agreed to link wage concessions to reductions in the price of its vehicles, but this was not part of the eventual agreement. The contract concessions were (at the time) the largest ever made to GM. The workers agreed to forgo an annual 3 percent wage increase, eliminated nine paid holidays over the next two years, deferred cost of living adjustments in the first three months of the contract to the final three quarters of the contract, established a wage tier that paid new employees 20 percent less, and implemented fines for chronic absenteeism. The union also agreed to negotiate over work rules at the local level. In return, GM agreed to keep four plants open which it had planned to close, agreed to a two-year moratorium on plant closings, established profit sharing, established a prepaid legal service program for its employees, and promised that if it laid off workers with 15 years or more of job experience it would pay them 50 percent of their annual salary. The pact was only narrowly approved, however (114,468 for and 105,090 against), even though UAW members at Ford Motor Company had approved a similar pact by a 3-to-1 margin.
Implementing the contract proved troublesome, however. Just days after the pact was approved by UAW members, GM attempted to give its executives large pay bonuses. Bieber angrily denounced the pay plan and GM backed off the proposal just two days later; however, the damage was done. Bieber began local bargaining over the work rules, but angry workers refused to negotiate any changes and bargaining ended in July 1982 with no changes.
In his last year as GM Department director, Bieber discussed with GM the impact outsourcing was having on UAW members. When GM signed a compact with Toyota to co-own and co-manufacture automobiles in California, Bieber worked to prevent UAW members in affected GM plants from engaging in a wildcat strike.
UAW presidential race.
The UAW constitution barred anyone over the age of 65 from running for president of the union. 64-year-old Douglas Fraser won re-election as UAW president in July 1981, but was barred from seeking a third term. In January 1982, Owen Bieber, Donald Ephlin (director of the Ford Department), Raymond Majerus (secretary-treasurer and director of the Aerospace Department and American Motors Department), and Stephen Yokich (director of the Agricultural Implement and Skilled Trades Department) were considered his most likely successors. At that time, Bieber and Majerus seemed to have the most support from the union's executive board.
It is a tradition in the UAW for the union's executive board to bar candidates from campaigning while contract negotiations are going on, to prevent any campaign from distracting union members or inflaming member opinions. Since the election of Walter Reuther as UAW president in 1947, the union had been dominated by the "Administrative Caucus," a pro-incumbent political party within the UAW which controlled every seat on the UAW executive board and the vast majority of leadership positions at the local level. Traditionally, the 26 Administrative Caucus members sitting on the UAW's executive board met first to select the caucus' official nominees for national office, then referred these nominees to the union's Administrative Caucus-dominated Steering Committee, which then ratified the board's choice. Delegates to the union's annual convention voted on these nominees (with no direct election by the membership). Although these procedures did not preclude the Steering Committee from rejecting the "official" slate or challengers from running for office, they made it highly unlikely that challengers would emerge or that the members would elect them if they did. (Additionally, union rules required that any challenger announce his or her candidacy at least 90 days before the election, and take a leave of absence from his or her job in order to run for office.) Although the executive board had not anticipated meeting until December 1982 to select its official candidate for president, the lack of a clear front-runner and the economic and collective bargaining challenges facing the union put pressure on the executive board to make its choice months earlier.
By late August, Majerus seemed to have a slim lead among executive board members over Ephlin, while the other candidates (including Bieber) did not have much support. At its meeting on September 20, the UAW executive board agreed to lift the campaigning moratorium, and set November 12 as the date for choosing its official slate. Support for the four candidates had not changed by this time. The relatively youthful Yokich was considered a dark horse candidate, and he was under pressure to withdraw and support one of the others. Ephlin, however, appeared to be gaining support due to his successful contract negotiations with Ford and his increasingly polished public speaking skills.
Bieber hesitated to enter the race for president. He announced his candidacy only in mid-October, long after Majerus and Ephlin. He later said he "agonized" about entering the race for the presidency after realizing what a heavy burden it might become.
On October 31, Yokich withdrew from the race and threw his support behind Bieber. Days later, a survey of 130 UAW local leaders in Michigan showed that Ephlin and Bieber had the most grassroots support, with Majerus a distant fourth behind Yokich. But Majerus appeared to have far more support on the UAW executive board, where African American vice president Marc Stepp was vocal in his support of the Majerus campaign. One media report estimated that Majerus had the support of as many as 10 of the 26 board members, while Bieber (whose campaign had been targeting regional directors and workers) may have had as many as 12 votes. Nonetheless, others considered Bieber a dark horse candidate because of the significant dissatisfaction the GM concessionary contract had generated.
As the UAW executive board gathered to make its decision, the race had shifted and Bieber appeared to have majority support on the board. Bieber appeared to have gained ground because he was a compromise candidate acceptable to both the Ephlin and Majerus camps. Some board members appear