Delphi workers picket CEO Miller

Delphi workers and their supporters picketed the Detroit Economic Club on April 3 as CEO “Steve” Miller was giving a major address. Delphi makes auto parts for General Motors. Three days earlier Miller had filed petitions with federal bankruptcy court judge Robert Drain to invalidate Delphi’s union contracts after the unions refused to accept Delphi’s latest “offer”: to give workers a one-time check for $50,000 in exchange for an almost 40 percent pay cut and the destruction of their pension plans.

WW photo: Dave Sole

The picket line was called by the rank-and-file group Soldiers of Solidarity and raised the slogans “Expose corporate fraud” and “No concessions.”

Meanwhile, about 45 hourly workers at Delphi’s Flint East operations who had been laid off on Friday, April 30, and told not to report to work on Monday “showed up anyway in defiance and refused to leave,” according to the Detroit Free Press. Claudia Perkins, a Delphi worker with 30 years’ seniority who organized the protest, said her coworkers were unfairly laid off because they had earned secured employment status under the union contract.

The workers won after some negotiating and were reinstated with back pay for missed days of work.

—Martha Grevatt