Workers engine plants protest shifts

Punishing and routine schedule changes that have workers pulling a day shift one week and an evening shift the next have upset many of the more than 400 hourly employees at the Dundee, Michigan, plant owned and run by Chrysler's Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance, or GEMA.Workers at a second Chrysler engine plant in Trenton, Michigan have also pushed union officials involved in the national contract talks with Chrysler to take up the issue of their work schedules in national contract talks expected to wrap up this week.Workers at the Dundee and Trenton plants say that Chrysler has the workers on a rotating shift schedule that calls for them to move between days and nights in order to limit costly overtime.

Gabe Solano, president of UAW Local 372, which represents about 460 workers at Chrysler's Trenton engine plant, said the schedules have strained worker health to the breaking point."A lot of people in there have diabetes, high blood pressure issues, let alone the life issues of child care," Solano said. "Every week people are jumping, jumping, jumping. We've been doing this rotation for a year now."Demand for the engines made at the two plants is high, and the shifts help meet that demand, Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson said. The contract between GEMA and the UAW calls for rotating shifts, she said.The rotating schedule was set up when the Dundee plant opened in 2005 run by GEMA, then a joint venture between Chrysler's owner at the time, Daimler AG, Hyundai Motor Co and Mitsubishi Motors Corp.

Hyundai and Mitsubishi have left the joint venture, leaving GEMA as a wholly owned subsidiary of Chrysler Group, which is majority owned by Italy's Fiat SpA. The current six year contract for the Dundee plant expires on October 14.Zimmerman said he had negotiated an easing of the rotating shift schedules after Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy, but the company reinstated the rotations in late 2010.Solano said some workers at the Dundee plant had requested transfers out of the plant to try to get some regularity to their work and sleep schedules."I'm afraid that we're going to find out that somebody did do something bad on a freeway in the middle of the night driving home, and potentially killing themselves or maiming themselves," he said. "That's the worst case scenario."