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Delphi Employees Liken Bankruptcy Filing to 'a Death in the Family'

Posted on: Tuesday, 11 October 2005, 21:00 CDT

By Stephen Franklin, Chicago Tribune

Oct. 12--DAYTON -- All the wild talk and rumors threw Scott Seibert into a dark mood. People were fretting about losing their jobs, their homes, and their savings.

Seibert couldn't wait Tuesday to leave early from the Delphi Corp. factory where he has worked for the last 29 years and 10 years. It was his birthday, too, but he didn't feel like celebrating.

"I find it hard to work right now with a knife sticking in my back," he said, over a drink at a worker hangout near the plant.

From him and many others here, the bankruptcy filing by Delphi, the nation's largest auto parts maker, represents the end of an era for a 95-year-old company that took its name from this once-thriving industrial city.

Delphi was previously Delco -- as in, Dayton Electronics Laboratory Co. -- formed here by a group who called themselves the "Barn Gang." In 1910, they started cranking out inventions in this town of inventors. The first automobile electric starter system was built here. The cash register was perfected here. And of course, the Wright Brothers built their plane here.

Now Dayton takes on a new significance beyond being yet another setting for the Midwest's fading blue-collar dreams.

It could become one of the battlegrounds in the slow dismantling of the traditional, unionized auto industry. The idea is that the Big 3 automakers are hopelessly overmatched by the Japanese and other competitors, and must completely gut their cost structures to keep afloat.

Delphi, spun off by GM and still its biggest parts supplier, is about to go through that wrenching change -- with workers here seeing their paychecks slashed.

Once restructured, Michigan-based Delphi could be a model for GM, Ford and German-owned Chrysler.

But the question is how hard the unions will fight back. If they cooperate, companies like Delphi and GM may find renewal. If they don't, GM could eventually find itself in bankruptcy court as well, where the rules would allow wholesale changes in spite of union objections.

Delphi wants the United Auto Workers to accept wage cuts to $10 to $12 an hour -- as much as 63 percent less than they're making now -- and benefit reductions as well. If its unions do not accept the changes, the company says it might shut plants and layoff of workers.

From 15,000 workers in 1999 when Delphi was spun off from General Motors Inc., the number of Delphi workers in the Dayton area has shrunk here to about 5,400. But so too other manufacturers have shrunk or vanished, leaving Delphi a major presence in the Dayton area.

The UAW's members average $25 to $29 an hour working at Delphi, and the union only recently was forced to accept a second tier of wages, starting at $14 an hour.

But the International Union of Electricians -- Communications Workers of America, which represents about 8,500 Delphi workers in the U.S., and the United Steel Workers union, which has about 1,000 Delphi members here, have not done as well.

Over the years those unions have accepted two-tiered wage scales starting as low as $7 an hour, wage freezes and given up traditional pensions in order to keep their members working.

"We've been telling the company for years that they should have been bringing work here. But they didn't take advantage of it," said Dennis Bingham, president of United Steel Workers local 87, which once had 8,500 workers in Dayton.

After years of bargaining to save jobs or create new ones, Bingham, who started out with the parts marker here 44 years ago, finds himself in a new and unsettling situation.

With a bankruptcy judge deciding the company's fate, "you feel like you don't have control. You feel like your future is in somebody else's hands," he said.

But the plight of the workers and their unions apparently doesn't touch everyone, as indicated by a heap of e-mail messages about the bankruptcy posted on the website of the local newspaper, the Dayton Daily News.

"Look what being a die-hard union state has done for Ohio. Unionized companies are not walking out of Ohio. They are running," one message writer said. "Cut their pay and raise their insurance and make them work for a living like the rest of us do," another wrote.

Andy Winchek, a veteran of 29 years and six months with the auto parts maker, has seen those messages, and they infuriate him.

"Yes, people may not be sympathetic with us. But wait. Wait till it starts showing up at their front door," he said, commiserating by himself at the end of his shift at the Need 1 More Tavern, a favorite among some Delphi workers.

What will these people say, he asked, when their jobs are sent overseas and their wages are cut?

As far as he saw it, Winchek did what he was told by company officials. "I kept my nose clean, and here they are pulling the plug. It is pretty sad," he said alone in a corner of the bar.

The news of the bankruptcy threw Frank Baker, 40, and his wife into instant financial planning. He was laid off from Delphi four years ago, and after six months of searching found a job at $6 less an hour, and with fewer benefits.

His wife has hung onto to her factory job at Delphi, but has not been able to move up the ranks in the last few years in order to receive a raise.

"Our life resolves around Delphi," said Baker, explaining that if the giant auto parts maker shuts down in Dayton, the small auto parts plant where he now will works will probably cut back too.

At the Delphi plant where Scott Seibert drives a forklift truck, all the talk so far this week has exactly been the same. What will happen if?

"People are scared to death," said Seibert, adding quickly that he saw "it" -- the company's shrinkage -- coming. He put aside money, and took part-time jobs teaching computer work. He prepared himself, he said, for the day that like his father, he, too, would retire from the auto parts maker. He father put in 40 years with the company, and retired 30 years ago, he said.

And yet when he read the news about the bankruptcy on his computer, he instantly caught his breath, and sudden unease swept him.

"It was like a death in the family," he said.

-----

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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