Buffalo Business First, December 17, 2009, Thursday

Buffalo Business First

December 17, 2009, Thursday

Buffalo Business First

UAW may elevate 2 in WNY

Joe Ashton and Scott Adams, leaders in the United Auto Workers’ Amherst-based Region 9, have been nominated for new upper-echelon UAW posts.

According to sources, the 61-year-old Ashton, who has been Region 9 director since 2006, was nominated at a national union caucus to become a vice president, working out of the UAW’s international office in Detroit.

Adams, 56 years old and Region 9’s assistant director for the past year, was nominated at a regional caucus to succeed Ashton as regional director, the same sources said.

With Ron Gettelfinger saying that he will retire in June, an exodus of other officers had been expected to create other leadership openings.

Region 9 encompasses Western and Central New York, New Jersey, and most of Pennsylvania.

Neither Ashton nor Adams would confirm the reports that they are in line for new positions with the union, which at it’s height in 1979 had 1.5 million members. Current membership is estimated at less than half a million.

Bob King, now a UAW vice president, reportedly is the preferred candidate to succeed Gettelfinger.

The appointments are subject to a vote at the UAW convention set for June 2010, but candidates backed by the union’s leadership traditionally sail through that process without serious opposition.

King, a soft-spoken Army veteran has headed negotiations with Ford which he joined in 1970, has been an advocate of the policies pursued by Gettelfinger over the past four years. They included concessions to the U.S. automaker at a time of deepening financial problems in the industry and plummeting union membership.

The post-Gettelfinger era will be particularly challenging for the new wave of top union leaders, the experts say.

At the Region 9 level, Adams — reportedly a close friend of King’s — and his counterparts elsewhere will have to concentrate on major tasks like rebuilding the union, say industry experts Arthur Wheaton in Buffalo and Kristin Dziczek in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“When the new leaders take control, we might see some different more creative approaches to the union’s main problem, which is declining membership,” said Dziczek, a research analyst with the Center for Automotive Research.

“Declining membership means declining power. How to reverse that is one thing they will be trying to accomplish,” she said.

Wheaton, with Cornell University’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations, praised Adams, who joined the union in 1972, the same year he went to work at Ford Motor Co.’s Woodlawn stamping plant.

“Scott is a terrific resource for UAW Region 9,” he said. “He was instrumental in keeping the Ford stamping plant in Western New York (and) was also generous in his time and expertise in helping keep Perry’s Ice Cream, a UAW-organized company, profitable with improved quality and productivity.

“He is also working hard to diversify the membership of the UAW to include casino workers and other service industry workers,” he said.

Under past and present union leadership, Region 9 is seen as being “much more cooperative and innovative in labor-management relations,” said Wheaton, director of the Cornell school’s Western New York labor and environmental programs.