As Senator John Kennedy's campaign for the U.S. In 1956, he was elected president of the local. In 1955 he was elected to the local bargaining committee and helped run negotiations on local plant issues. In 1951 he became a member of the executive board of Local 687 and helped administer local union affairs. He told the Detroit News that the negotiating began 'almost the second they gave me the steward button because there were grievances to take care of, and that's part of collective bargaining.' Bieber was to become a highly skilled bargainer as he worked his way up the union ranks in Grand Rapids. If my father hadn't worked there, too, I probably would have.'īut a year later, at age 19, Bieber was elected to his first union position-shop steward-at UAW Local 687 at the plant.

After the first hour in there, I felt like just leaving. Told Kathy Sawyer of the Washington Post: 'It was a hard job. The younger Bieber's first job was bending by hand the thick border wire on car seats. A native of the small, northwest Michigan farm community of North Dorr, Bieber went to work in 1948 at the same auto supply plant that employed his father-McInerney Spring and Wire Company in nearby Grand Rapids. 'One of his strengths, supporters maintain, is that he understands the wants of rank-and-file workers and is himself a true believer in the trade-union gospel,' Buss states.īieber's baptism in that gospel goes back many years, to his first job out of high school. In return, the UAW agreed that Saturn workers would receive starting base pay that is 85 percent of the going rate at traditional auto plants.īieber, a large man at six-foot-five and about 250 pounds, 'is more purely a labor populist, not much given to trafficking with big thinkers outside the UAW or to serving on panels studying the problems of industry,' writes Dale Buss of the Wall Street Journal. The pact, which drew attention from other industries because of its startling departure from past labor-management practices, lets auto workers share in some management decisions on how the plant is operated. Bieber also negotiated the first labor contracts for GM's innovative Saturn small-car project, which began producing a new generation of American cars in 1990. In return, the union agreed to more moderate wage increases than are traditional in auto contracts. Instead, the companies must find new work for the employees and retrain them if necessary. For example, Bieber negotiated historic job guarantee programs that prohibit the companies from laying off workers when new technology eliminates their jobs. Bieber struggled to find a balance between the companies' demands to be competitive and the needs of his members to keep their jobs.īusiness Week reports one company negotiator as saying Bieber 'is a deliberate, hard-working man of great integrity who tempers his comments and actions with an eye for the political consequences.' Those attributes helped Bieber negotiate some novel labor agreements at the domestic Big Three automakers-General Motors Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and Chrysler Corporation. More than 200,000 auto workers lost their jobs during that time because of the changes in the industry. companies that own them reeled in the 1980s from increased competition from lower-cost foreign carmakers and an early 1980s auto slump that saw sales fall to their lowest level since the Great Depression. Elected UAW president in May 1983, Bieber led more than one million union members, most of whom work in the nation's auto plants.

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