| President Mike Huerta Archive |
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December 2024I want to wish you all a great holiday season and I hope you are all able to spend some time with your families and enjoy some down time. The UAW Constitution preamble states – “The precepts of democracy require that workers through their union participate meaningfully in making decisions affecting their welfare and that of the communities in which they live.” Every year I am overwhelmed by the generosity of our membership. This year LDT went above and beyond. 602, you have chosen to be the light during some family’s darkest times. I hope that you know that a child will smile, laugh and play during the holiday because of you. A child will have shoes or boots during the winter when they otherwise might not have because of you. Our community will be a better place because of your generosity. $11,270 for our Toys for Tots gate collections, $7,778 from the Old Newsboys gate collections, 217 bikes and so many toys that we needed to make two trips with a 28-foot box truck and a pick-up truck pulling an enclosed trailer to get all the toys to the Toys for Tots headquarters. I would say that you took the constitutional mandate to “participate meaningfully” seriously! Great job Local 602, I couldn’t be any prouder to be your President!! This holiday season, I encourage you to remember those who may not be feeling as festive. We all go through highs and lows in our lives. Offering an ear to vent can mean the world to someone that is having a hard time. Taking the time to reach out to those that may be alone during the holidays can be a lifeline. I want to wish Walt Ball and Lori Fisher all the best in their retirement! We were lucky to have you both during your stay in Lansing and thank you for your service to Local 602. We are sorry to see you leave but we are happy that you will finally get to go back home to Lordstown. I want to thank the membership of UAW Local 602 for the hard work you all do every day and for the honor of representing you every day. Wishing you all Happy Holidays and a New Year filled with blessings. In Solidarity, Mike September 2024I hope you had a great summer and in the coming months you are able to enjoy the amazing fall colors this year. I want to give a big thank you to our Retiree Chair Marta Bobillo for putting on a great picnic for the retirees this year! It was great to see everyone relaxing and breaking bread with brothers and sisters that they haven’t seen in a while. I also want to thank the membership for your patience during the transition back to three shifts. It has been a long wait and we have gone through and are still dealing with some growing pains. We hope the chaos that this change has brought begins to settle down in the coming weeks. With the Presidential election cycle in full swing, we are getting a lot of calls asking for yard signs. We, like everyone else in Lansing, are still waiting for the Harris and Walz signs to arrive. In the hall currently, we have the signs for Curtis Hertel, Angela Witwer and Elissa Slotkin who have all joined local 602 on our picket lines during the 2019 and 2023 strikes. With less than 60 days left in the election, please take time to make sure your family is registered and informed about the candidates up and down the ballot. Please go to UAWendorsements.org to find UAW endorsed candidates not only from our area but that site has the candidates for the whole country. Please, please, please take the time to vote, a democratic union AND a democratic country require participation. Voting is the absolute minimum for our country and for our union to remain effective. It is the absolute least we can do; choosing not to vote is as ridiculous as voting for someone that thinks firing striking workers is funny. We need to take our obligation to vote seriously, many fought and died for us to be able to participate. Michigan will have more access to voting by mail and in person than ever before, so there is no excuse to not participate, see you at the polls! In Solidarity, Mike June 2024I hope you all get a chance to enjoy some time off during the summer; Michigan is truly amazing this time of year! Local 602 is in the strange position of having layoffs and hiring at the same time. As you all know, layoffs seem to be part of the job in the auto industry. I hope that GM will start to understand that we can avoid some of these supply chain issues by bringing work back to the United States instead of trying to ship parts from all over the world to Lansing. I know you have heard this before but American workers shouldn’t have to hope that parts from one part of the world get shipped to another part of the world to get packaged and sent to Michigan in time for us to build a car, what a joke! On a more positive note, GM has been hiring new workers so that we can start a third shift. Four thousand people applied for around 600 jobs at LDT! I explain to each group of new hires that the ground work for these new hires to get hired in off the street has been years in the making. The long road from bankruptcy time frame to now has been filled with battles and strikes making the new starting wage structure and benefits package possible for this incredible opportunity. I tell them “we have been fighting for you years before we ever get the chance to meet you!” A few day before Memorial Day UAW local 602 held a VFW Buddy poppy drive at the LDT plant gates. Even with a shift on layoff LDT workers donated nearly three thousand dollars! If you have not heard of the VFW poppy program it provides compensation to those who assemble the poppies, provides financial assistance in maintaining state and national veterans' rehabilitation and service programs and partially supports the VFW National Home. I think it is a very fitting way to start the Memorial day weekend, thank you to Veterans Chair Bernadine Ross, the entire local 602 Veterans committee, everyone that helped with the collection and everyone that donated. It was a special honor to have Bill Ames a Vietnam War Veteran and Marvin Moorehouse a World War II Veteran Join us at LDT to pick up the donations, thank you to both of these heroes and to all of our Veterans! In Solidarity, Mike March 2024I hope this finds you all healthy and well. It feels like spring is here and we can all be thankful for a pretty mild winter. For all of you snowmobilers and those that enjoy ice fishing…maybe next year. I want to acknowledge our UAW Local 602 Women’s committee – I have been hearing non-stop praise for the highlights of Local 602 Women that they have been putting out on social media. It is so refreshing to see the buzz on the floor be about something positive and to see our hard working members get the spotlight they so justly deserve. Great job Sisters!! I was able to attend the UAW National CAP conference in Washington DC in January. It was great being able to meet with Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters with the entire Michigan group of delegates. It was likely the last time we would be able to meet with Senator Stabenow as she will be retiring in November. I took the opportunity to thank her for visiting our picket sites during the 2023 strike and the 2019 strike, as well as always being an advocate for working families during her 24 years in the Senate. Rep. Elissa Slotkin flew back from Michigan to meet with her constituents at the conference. I took the opportunity to thank her as well for supporting us during the strike with visits from her, her staff and the multiple times they brought food and water for us. Jason Peek and I were asked to do some interviews with the UAW communications team and I was proud of Jason for agreeing to do it. He is always fantastic when he represents us! The last day of the conference UAW President Shawn Fain gave an incredible speech as he announced the UAW endorsement of President Joe Biden. If you have not heard the speech I would urge you to seek it out and listen to President Fain speak on the stark differences of our two choices. President Fain spoke five words towards the end of his speech and I truly thought the roof was about to cave in. The 5 words were – “Donald Trump is a SCAB!!” President Biden’s speech was great too and the room full of UAW members were incredibly receptive. It was an amazing way to end the conference, and even though I contracted COVID I am grateful that I was able to attend. In Solidarity, Mike December 2023I would like to wish all of our members a joyous holiday season and hope that the season brings you all some rest and time with loved ones. Please remember to check in on those that may be alone over the holidays, sometimes this time of year is difficult for many so please do not forget them. I want to thank our membership for being ready when we were called to “Stand up” during our nearly 5 week-long strike. Halloween costumes, retirees helping us picket on Wednesdays, Rosie the riveter day, Womens brigade day, members cooking hot meals for picket sites, UAW members from Arlington, Ft. Wayne, Spring Hill, Chicago, Flint, Detroit, Muskegon and Lansing all joining us on the line, it was an incredible display of Solidarity and you should all be proud! The amount of support from the community was incredible and we compiled a list of those that supported us, we will be posting the list to our website, social media and we will be putting it in our local 602 calendar as well. We can give back a little by frequenting their businesses, supporting them as they supported us. It is said that in a time of peace, prepare for war, whether you voted for the 2023 agreement or against it our preparation for 2028 should begin now. With some big items left on the table it will likely be another tough set of negotiations so please be prepared. If you ask how could I be thinking about 2028 right now it is because I know that we are given nothing. Decades of strong UAW workers fought like hell to get what they could and set the path to get things that they would never enjoy themselves. Our cause is bigger than one round of negotiations; our cause takes longer than a lifetime. We fight for a better life for autoworkers, for working families, for the middle class, for a better country, state, community and union. Our hope is to leave them better off than we found them, just like the giants that came before us did. They did not quit when all of their goals were not met and neither can we. You all made me very proud to be part of the leadership of UAW local 602, thank you from the bottom of my heart! Solidarity Forever! Mike September 2023I hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend and enjoyed the time off with family and friends. With summer behind us the UAW moves to our busy season…contract negotiations! During the next few weeks please check in on your UAW family. We are all anxious for the outcome of the negotiations and we can be very stressed so if you are able - drop a text, make a call or stop and visit each other just to make sure. Unions are the last, best hope for working families to be able to demand fairness from giant multi-billion dollar corporations. With the big three contracts all set to expire on September 14th it seems that public opinion is in our favor. A recent poll of registered voters conducted by the AFL-CIO suggests voters across the board strongly see labor unions as beneficial, needed now more than ever and yet harder to join. Support transcends partisan groups, with Republicans and independents supporting unions, and younger voters particularly likely to support them. An overwhelming majority supports unions and strikes, even majorities of Republicans and independents. Seven-in-ten (71%) approve of labor unions, while less than a fifth (19%) disapprove. Labor union approval transcends party—with 91% of Democrats, along with more than two-thirds (69%) of independents and half of Republicans (52%) approving. Support for strikes further exceeds union approval. Three-fourths (75%) support “workers going on strike to negotiate for better wages, benefits, and working conditions” with nearly half (47%) strongly supporting doing so. Again, clear majorities of Democrats (93%), independents (73%), and Republicans (58%) support strikes. As far as the UAW; 75% of Americans sympathize more with the UAW than with the auto companies (19%) in their current negotiations. It seems like the wind is at our back. In 2019, our community blessed us with a remarkable outpouring of support during our strike and I have already had dozens of calls asking how to help. Let’s hope the Auto companies understand that our communities and America has our backs and they want us to be fairly compensated for our labor. Our active members are ready, our retirees are ready and should we go on strike our communities are ready. April 2023It is great to finally see the start of Spring! It seemed like we had more snow in February and March than we did in November and December. Hopefully we can put the snow shovels away for the year finally! I want to thank our Civil Rights Committee for an outstanding “taste of Black History” event that was held in February. We had a packed house with standing room only and the speakers, food and entertainment were fantastic! Great job Robert Wade and the entire committee! In March, Local 602 Women’s committee held their International Women’s Day program “Petals and Progression”. I didn’t recognize the union hall when I walked in! It was great to hear from the March of Dimes Interim CEO Kathryn Johnson, UAW International Women’s Dept. Assistant Director Ashley Lewis and Senator Sarah Anthony. What a great program and celebration for International Women’s Day thank you 602 Women’s Committee! UAW Local 602 elected delegates, Retiree Chair, Shop Chair and I just returned from the UAW International Special Bargaining Convention. During the Convention we heard from John Deere workers and what they went through during their 5 week-long strike. We also heard from CASE/New Holland workers as they described what they went through during their 260 day long strike. These stories were often emotional and familiar from our 40 day long strike back in 2019. The message was clear, we autoworkers need to be ready for anything during a contract year let us not get caught unprepared. With the International leadership election finished and the UAW International Special Bargaining Convention over our local will now turn our attention to local elections. Please keep on eye open for election postings on our in-plant notice boards, local 602 website, social media and in this issue of the Lansing Labor News for more details. Please remember that the Local 602 Union Meeting has been moved to May 7th so we can spend Mother’s day weekend with family. They make our days brighter, their smiles melt our hearts, and their love is second to nothing. Mothers have a special place in our lives, so this is a special day for everyone. Thank you to all Mothers and I hope everyone is able to celebrate Mother’s day with family. In Solidarity, Mike Huerta February 2023I hope you all enjoyed a much deserved holiday break and were able to enjoy some downtime with your families. Our extra two weeks off came with some headaches getting our Sub pay but I am so thankful for our Beneftis reps and our Unemployment rep that helped us navigate those systems. February brings us Black History month and UAW local 602 will be joining with UAW local 2256 to hold our Taste of Black History program on Sunday February 19th with doors opening at 2:30 pm and program beginning at 3 pm. Our address is 2510 W. Michigan Ave. Lansing, MI 48917. This is the first time we have been able to have this event since prior to COVID and we hope you will be able to join us! We will have food, prizes, entertainment and speakers the event is free so bring your family and enjoy the afternoon with friends. Next month our Women’s committee will be having their women’s international day event on March 25th. Please keep an eye on www.local602.org for more soon to come details. I received a surprising phone call the other day. Rep. Elissa Slotkin called me to ask if I would like to be her guest at the State of the Union in Washington D.C., she said that she wanted to shine a light on supply chain issues and that I would be speaking media and elected officials about the chips shortage and our parts shortages. I was stunned but of course I accepted the offer. By the time you read this I will be back from Washington D.C. but I think its important that the country hears from us as often as possible that America needs to build things. Shipping manufacturing jobs outside of the United States for decades has eroded our stability and made us beholden to other parts of the world that may not have our best interest at heart. Rep. Slotkin told me that I wouldn’t be representing just local 602 but all autoworkers and working families that have been affected by this issue. It is an honor and I couldn’t be prouder to be the voice speaking for all of us! In Solidarity, Mike Huerta December 2022I would like to recap some of the events going on at UAW Local 602 in the past few months. Thank you to our Citizenship & Legislative Committee for help producing the wins during this election cycle. Thanks to everyone that helped UAW endorsed candidates this year! Whether you knocked on doors, made phone calls or voted as a family, you helped our candidates get across the finish line and we won big! Shortly after the elections, our Veterans Committee put together another wonderful event at the plant. We gave our Veterans shoes, other gifts and important information regarding their service and benefits. Thank you Veterans committee and to all who served! Many members were able to enjoy Thanksgiving with a good meal this year as our Community Service Committee was able to provide holiday meals for families in need. The LDT gate collection on November 3rd raised more than $8,500 for Toys for tots. The Local 602 Women’s Committee held a “Holiday Expo” at the union hall to raise money for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. They were able to raise $2,300. The LDT gate collection on December 1st raised $6,300 for Old Newsboys. In the span 28 days our unbelievably generous members, and our amazing standing committees raised over $17,000. The money will help make sure kids have presents at Christmas, help to find a cure for cancer, and to make sure kids in our community have boots this winter. Thank you to everyone that donated, volunteered, or helped organize these events - Amazing job 602! On Dec. 2nd two full trailers, and two full truckloads of toys, gifts and bicycles were loaded up from LDT GA, Body and Paint shops. They were taken to the Toys for Tots building where the toys will meet their new owners! We had to wait for nearly 3 years, but we finally were able to hold our UAW Local 602 Children’s Christmas party on December 4th! Thank you to the Women’s Committee, Santa AND the Grinch for helping make this event an enormous success! Every year I am left speechless when I witness the enormous amount of generosity, kindness and caring that our membership produces for our community. To all, I wish the gifts of love, of joy and of peace during this holiday season and always. September 2022The year has really flown by! I hope this article finds you all in good health and spirit. I want to thank everyone that attended Lansing Delta Townships recent Open House. We had over 4,300 visitors and by all accounts, it was wildly successful. I also want to recognize local 602’s Conservation and Recreation Committee. This year our local 602 golf outing donations went to Footprints of Michigan. Footprints of Michigan donates shoes to those in need, Veterans and homeless across the state. Thank you Paulina Rodriguez, all of your committee and all who participated for the generous $3,100 donation. As fall approaches, I hope you all take the time to participate in two very important elections this year. 2022 is an important election year for our state. The Capital Area CAP Council did a screening of local candidates and decided what candidates we would recommend to endorse. UAW endorsed candidates were very successful in the August primaries. We all have a lot of hard work ahead of us to get our endorsed candidates elected on November 8th. You will find a list of our UAW endorsed candidates in this issue of the Labor News; you can also find it on the UAW local 602 website. These candidates were endorsed based on their voting records, knowledge of issues that pertain to our membership and their willingness to communicate with us so that they know what we expect from them. Please consider supporting these candidates. “What the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls.” - Walter Reuther This is also an important election year for our union. Our top officers will be elected by mail in ballot. All members in good standing, active and retired, are eligible to vote. In order for our members to receive their ballot they must have current mailing addresses at their local union halls, from the UAW monitors election notice: “PLEASE PROVIDE YOUR UPDATED MAILING AND E-MAIL ADDRESS INFORMATION TO YOUR LOCAL UNION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND ADVISE YOUR FELLOW MEMBERS TO DO THE SAME. IF YOU ARE A NEW MEMBER WHO HAS RECENTLY JOINED THE UAW, YOU MUST MAKE SURE YOUR LOCAL UNION HAS YOUR INFORMATION.” Please update your address with the union hall if necessary and if you know someone that has moved recently please remind them to take a few minutes to call us with the updated info. In Solidarity, April 2022Ryan Eding is the Production Zone Committee person for UAW local 602. While many may think Ryan is quiet and doesn’t have much to say I would point out that being thoughtful about what someone says is very different than not having much to say. Ryan recently shared with me his thoughts on the upcoming elections at our local. I think this message applies to all locals so I asked if I could share it in the Lansing Labor News, he agreed. Brothers and Sisters Election season is upon us. This is the time you see new faces that want to get involved. That is great news! The question I will ask is why? I say why because I want to know if they want to make the union better or are they doing it for themselves? I will always invite members to help make our union better! We have a great union…...and new faces can only help make our union stronger again. With that being said that doesn’t mean we need to burn the house down or start over from scratch! We all know that we had a bad few but let that not define me and you! The foundation that this union started on was perfect and we let a few get us away from that. So I won’t sit here and tell you OUR union is weak or messed up because that is far from the truth. We need to continue to guide our union back to the way we started! That starts with elections and member involvement! When we elect our districts and con con delegates ask them the question why are you running? I got started because I wanted to help our union grow and get stronger. At times this union may seem like everything is bad. But we can not let a few bad apples define us! I’m proud of every one of our elected officials! It’s rough and anyone of them could have threw their hands up and walk away but they didn’t! They stand in the fire and continue to fight every day to try and make this union stronger! I was born union and I love this union. I would die for this union. You should settle for nothing less! Solidarity! 4th generation union member, Ryan Eding Thank you Brother Eding! March 2022I was proud to represent local 602 at the State Capitol for the news of GM investing $7 Billion in Michigan. Portions of the investment are specifically for LDT and LGR. A more significant portion is for a brand new battery plant in Delta Township. There have not been many details released about this facility other than its location. Over the course of the last year, we in the auto industry have been screaming from the rooftops that if our parts were built in the United States we would not be having supply chain issues. I hope that this announcement and investment is the start of GM keeping some of its investments here at home in Michigan. Too often, we have seen these investments go overseas or to southern states which are often not union friendly. This investment was ushered in by something that is not seen too often these days, a series of bi-partisan agreements in Lansing. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan State House, the Michigan State Senate, Lansing City Council, Lansing Board of Water and Light and Delta Township officials all agreed to a package of bills that cleared the way for GM to announce its largest investment ever. Of course, not everyone supported bringing and keeping jobs in the Lansing area. Michigan State Senator Tom Barrett, whose district is home to the GM Lansing Delta Township Assembly plant and where the new battery plant will be built, voted against it. Now he plans on running for congress in a district that would represent Lansing Grand River, Lansing Delta Township and local 1753’s GM customer care center as well as many of the supplier plants along Canal road. As we all know when a new plant comes in, every full-time factory job also brings several more jobs in the area along with it, I think it’s a huge problem for Tom Barrett to be against that. Autoworkers are an important part of Michigan’s history and I am glad that most of our elected officials recognize that. Thank you to all of the elected officials from both sides of the aisle that supported Michigan autoworkers and shame on those that did not. December 2021Let me take this opportunity to wish all the membership of UAW Local 602, active and retired, a happy and safe holiday season. September 2021When will we learn? In the May issue of the Lansing Labor News I wrote, “Please keep our brothers and sisters that are experiencing long periods of layoff in your thoughts. The global microchip shortage has dramatically affected production of many industries. those of us in the U.S. labor movement have been demanding the millions of jobs that have been outsourced or moved to countries with questionable environmental and labor standards be brought back to the United States so that this type of supply chain issue would never happen.” Now it’s local 602’s turn. As you are reading this local 602 active members will be in their 2nd month of Layoff due to microchip supply issues. May 2021Please keep our brothers and sisters that are experiencing long periods of layoff in your thoughts. The global microchip shortage has dramatically affected production of many industries. Those of us in the U.S. labor movement have been demanding the millions of jobs that have been outsourced or moved to countries with questionable environmental and labor standards be brought back to the United States so that this type of supply chain issue would never happen. If International Labor Standards and/or Trade Agreements were enforced the world would likely not crash to a stop when a ship gets stuck in a canal or a fire occurs in a manufacturing facility in Japan. Decades of allowing Corporations to write disastrous legislation, Trade Agreements and put their political puppets in key governing bodies has weakened the middle class. Recently President Biden appointed Thea Lee head of the Labor Department's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which enforces trade commitments and investigates forced labor and child labor around the world. If you are unfamiliar with Thea Lee – last year weeks before the world shut down due to COVID she spoke to the UAW CAP conference in Washington D.C.: Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute shared a message that connected economic inequality with the past three decades of injustice and crippling inequalities for working families. “The economy is less fair… not morally fair,” Lee said. “CEO pay at the top firms have risen 1,000% since 1979, while working families have seen a 12% increase and some families are working two or three jobs to afford health care, education and housing. “Ninety percent of the people in this country are working harder. This is not a healthy economy for working families and it’s our job to figure out what to do next,” Lee said. Taking her decades of experience working for the AFL-CIO, the Economic Policy Institute and with the Obama Administration she will now be in a position to be the voice of working families in the United States. Hopefully she will be able to help fix decades of misguided policy across the globe. Lastly, as summer nears it may seem like we are ready to have backyard BBQ’s, camping trips and vacations. Please remember that COVID is still with us and taking the few moments of extra precaution can save a life or prevent hospitalization/long term illness and if you have not yet been vaccinated please consider doing so.
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