THE DESIGN STAFF STORY

In 1973, after a challenging organizing drive and a victorious election, the Advanced Engineering Department within GM Design was officially recognized as a UAW bargaining unit. This marked the birth of UAW Local 1869 - the first all-salaried local within General Motors.

Despite facing early challenges, including a decertification attempt in 1974, our determination prevailed, and the effort was successfully defeated in January 1975. Just a few months later, in May 1975, we celebrated a milestone achievement—the negotiation of our first collective bargaining agreement with GM.

The Advanced Engineering department consisted of draftspersons who developed engineering section drawings as a part of surface development. In 1978, when Ken Pickering became the Director of Engineering, the group was renamed to Surface and Prototype Engineering, in order to more accurately reflect the kind of work the group did. As technology and job functions changed, so did their name and role within GM Design. They have been known as Experimental Engineering, Exterior Engineering Department, Interior Engineering Department, Automotive Product Engineering, Advanced Engineering, Surface & Prototype Engineering among others.

Eventually, the department was divided between their surface development and prototype development functions and created the second district of Local 1869. They, too have had many names, including Prototype Engineering, SPE Buck Group, Buck Group, PPO, and Pre-Production Engineering.

Today those two groups make up the Surface Product Engineering (SPE) and Fabrication Engineering (Fab. Eng.) Departments.

Later, in 1985 the Trim Shop, part of fabrication operations of GM Design elected to become a part of Local 1869 and became the third district within our Local. They have remained the principle craftspeople responsible for all interior trim projects within Design, though they have been affiliated with Pre-Production Operations (PPO) at various points in history.

History Spotlight: Calfin vs General Motors

In September of 1976, Maurice “Maury” Calfin and other members of UAW Local 1869 filed a complaint against General Motors, with the support of UAW legal counsel, for being paid less than the required rate for for overtime (1.5x base rate) as determined by the US Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA). GM had been paying them less for their overtime work by classifying certain design draftspersons and other employees as ‘Professional Exempt’. The US Department of Labor was informed of the legal complaint and immediately got involved.

Though it took almost a year of legal wrangling, in June of 1977, UAW attorney Leonard Page was informed by the Department of Labor that they had entered into a settlement agreement with General Motors to reclassify several thousand white collar workers at GM to ‘non-exempt’ - meaning they were entitled to the full overtime compensation they were owed. About 1500 of the affected employees were located at the GM Technical Center in Warren, MI and included 57 senior design engineers and senior project engineers, several of whom were members of UAW Local 1869.

As a result of this settlement with the Department of Labor, Judge James P. Churchill entered a “Consent Judgement” against GM. This ruling decreed that effective August 1, 1977 each of the plaintiffs would be compensated at a rate of not less than one and one half times their regularly hourly rate for all hours worked in excess of 40 hours.

On hearing this judgement Maury Calfin and Don Savage, another plaintiff and UAW Local 1869 Member, said it was “long overdue equity”. At the time, employees were working 300-400 hours of overtime a year, some members seeing significant increases in their rates.

UAW Vice-President and Director of UAW GM Department, Irving Bluestone, and then Region 1 Director Stephen P. Yokich stated, "Without the union's lawsuit, the reclassification of 3,000 GM white-collar employees to non-exempt status, bringing them under the full overtime pay requirements of the federal law, probably never would have happened. Those non-union employees are receiving that benefit because of UAW and that is typical of many other benefits they enjoy.”