Bob King, a trained lawyer and journeyman electrician who leads the United Auto Workers’ Ford Motor negotiating department, will be tapped to succeed Ron Gettelfinger as the attenuated union’s president, according to Bloomberg News sources.
If things go as expected, the sources said, Gettelfinger and his Administration Caucus will nominate King and other anointed officers on Wednesday, and the slate will go to a voice vote of delegates at the UAW constitutional convention next June.
The succession comes at one of the most challenging times in the UAW’s nearly 75-year history, with membership shrunk to 431,000, down from a peak of 1.5 million in 1979. General Motors and Chrysler are restructuring after bankruptcy, during which Gettelfinger’s UAW became a significant investor in both companies. Ford, the only U.S. automaker not to seek bankruptcy protection, is forecasting profitability in 2011.
“The next president of the UAW will have some defining challenges for the union and the broader economy in seeking to preserve a domestic manufacturing base,” Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told Bloomberg. “None of it will be easy.”
But, Shaiken said, “Bob King has been a strong proponent of a competitive industry. People respect him for sticking to his principles even if they voted against the latest changes.”
Those changes, which King tried to sell the union members at Ford in October, were to have matched concessions given by the UAW to GM and Chrysler, including a six-year “no strike” clause and freezing pay for new hires until 2015. The givebacks were overwhelmingly voted down, leading some to suggest that King’s presidential candidacy was weakened.
But the one challenge that presented itself, from UAW Chicago regional director Dennis Williams, was averted by the coming retirement of Elizabeth Bunn, who as UAW secretary-treasurer is the union’s highest ranking woman, the Detroit Free Press reported. Williams is expected to be nominated as her replacement.
If elected, King, 63, will be limited to a single four-year term by UAW administrative bylaws requiring leaders to retire at the end of a term in which they turn 65. Gettelfinger, now in his second term as UAW president, is now retirement age.
Bloomberg’s sources detailed other expected successions:
- James Settles Jr., to replace King. Settles now is the UAW vice president handling negotiations for agricultural toolmakers.
- Joe Ashton, the union’s regional director in western New York, to run the UAW’s GM section. Vice President General Holiefield will continue to lead negotiations with Chrysler.
King, whose father was a director of industrial relations at Ford, went to work at company in 1970 after earning a political science degree from the University of Michigan and serving two years with the U.S. Army in South Korea, where he met his wife, Sun Yun. While beginning the training that would earn his journeyman electrician’s license, King studied law at the University of Detroit and graduated in 1973.
In 1981, he was elected a vice president of UAW Local 600, representing workers at the enormous Ford Rouge manufacturing facility in Dearborn, Mich., was elected president of the local in 1984, and rose to UAW vice president in 1998. He was elected to his third term in 2006.
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