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(snip)By all accounts, BMW's parts distribution warehouse in Ontario was one of the jewels of the company's system.
Supplying dealer service departments throughout Southern California, Arizona and Nevada, it received gold medals from BMW for its efficiency and employed several of the top-ranked workers in the country. In the roughly 40 years its workers had been represented by the Teamsters union, there had never been a labor stoppage.
Times being what they are, when a Teamsters committee came to the plant in early June to open negotiations over a new contract to start Sept. 1, they thought they might be asked to accept minuscule wage increases and maybe some givebacks on health coverage.
They were stunned by what they heard instead: As of Aug. 31, the plant would be outsourced to an unidentified third-party logistics company and all but three of its 71 employees laid off.
The union contract will be terminated. Some of the employees might be offered jobs with the new operator, but there are no guarantees. And no one expects the new bosses will match the existing $25 hourly scale or the health benefits provided now.
The average seniority of employees at Ontario is about 20 years; five have spent 30 years or more at Ontario or its predecessor warehouse in Carson. Of the employees to be laid off (according to a notice BMW sent the union), 27 are age 50 or older. The word that came most often to the lips of workers and their families I've talked to is "devastated."(snip)
(snip)"BMW says for the record that it's "very much aware of its legal obligations and corporate responsibilities." The company will negotiate with the Teamsters over severance but won't discuss that or other transitional issues in public. It notes that it still employs 10,000 people in California, including those at two vehicle technology centers and Newbury Park-based BMW DesignworksUSA, and says that number might grow in the future.
The company doesn't concede that it's outsourcing the Ontario plant to save money on wages. It says it brought in outside logistic contractors at Ontario and four of its other five parts depots nationwide because it prefers to focus on its "core expertise" of engineering and making cars. Of course, nonunion workforces generally receive lower pay and benefits than union — that's the power of collective bargaining — so the math is hardly a secret.
If there are operational efficiencies to be gained from the outsourcing, as BMW contends, the firm presumably expects them to translate into higher profits, but it won't be sharing the money with the warehouse workers. Among the most likely beneficiaries are its shareholders — maybe via another dividend boost on top of the $950-million raise the company gave them out of its $4.7-billion profit last year.
BMW's defenders will point out that the company has a perfect legal right to outsource any jobs it wishes. Fair enough. Yet by the same token, American taxpayers had a perfect legal right to tell BMW to drop dead when the firm's credit arm asked the Federal Reserve for a low-interest $3.6-billion loan during the 2008 financial crisis. BMW got the money then because U.S. policymakers saw a larger issue at stake: saving the economy from going over a cliff. Just as there's a larger issue involved at Ontario, which is saving the American middle class from going over the same cliff.
The Ontario union, Teamsters Local 495, got Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Reps. Joe Baca (D-Rialto) and Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) to write painfully polite letters to Jim O'Donnell, chairman of BMW North America, asking him to reconsider. When I say that's the least they could do, I'm talking literally — it's the very least. How about hauling him before a televised hearing and having him balance out a $3.6-billion taxpayer loan with the firing of 70 American workers? The company surely wouldn't characterize its federal loan as charity, but neither is maintaining its parts distribution workers on a living wage."(snip)
The take-away from this decision by BMW was that they have 'learned' a great deal from the recent NLRB ruling re Boeing attempting to open a new non-union aircraft production facility in Charleston. That ruling basically created a new legal 'doctrine' that the addition of non-union jobs for the purpose of eliminating 'union' labor strikes as a future production risk factor is illegal. So BMW simply side-stepped the ruling by outsourcing the entire Ontario California parts supply operation. In other words, Boeing was adding non-union US jobs with no direct and immediate elimination of 'union' US jobs ... whereas BMW will be eliminating 'union' US jobs and de-facto replacing them with non-union jobs via a subcontractor ( at even lower pay rates and even fewer employee benefits than BMW would typically pay / provide its own non-union US workers in 'right to work' states ).
Thus the 'Unintended Consequences' theory is again proven true re the recent NLRB ruling ! If this 'domestic outsourcing' withstands legal challenges, expect it to become widespread in a big hurry !!!



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