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QUICK FACTS The Yettaw years Significant dates in Dave Yettaw’s career:
Source: Flint Journal files A strong, controversial - and routinely critical - voice within the UAW has been stilled. Dave Yettaw, 58, former president of UAW Local 599, died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday night, according to reports and area union officials. He lived in Oscoda. Funeral arrangements are pending at Miles Martin Funeral Home in Mt. Morris. His family could not be immediately reached for comment. Yettaw served as president of the once-muscular UAW Local 599 at the former Buick City. He was well-known for his old-school defense of union tenets, his criticism of UAW leadership trends that separated union officials from line workers, and his fear that cooperation with General Motors and Delphi Corp. was undermining the union. He also wasn’t shy about verbally blasting GM when he felt that workers’ rights and union protections were at risk. “I do not feel that you deal with a power like GM from a kneeling position,” Yettaw told Flint City Council members in 1992, as they considered a tax break for GM. “We need to act quickly to save the jobs we do have. I do not feel that resolutions and diplomatic double-talk will work.” Yettaw saw the slide in local UAW jobs firsthand. When he started at Buick in 1965, there were nearly 20, 000 hourly workers at that site alone. Today, there are about 2, 400 - and just under 20, 000 total UAW-Delphi-GM hourly and salaried workers in the area. Even in his retirement, Yettaw did not stifle his criticism of the union or GM. He was a frequent editorial page voice at The Journal - and frequently called the paper to suggest story angles or critique the latest moves by the UAW or the company. “I’ve known him since we were probably 5 or 6 years old,” said Bob Roth, director of UAW Region 1-C, the highest ranking UAW position in mid-Michigan. “There are several issues we didn’t always agree on, but he was very passionate in his beliefs - and I’m going to miss him.” Roth said he and Yettaw were part of a crew of boys who grew up in the Mt. Morris area who went on to work for GM. Yettaw and Roth went to work at Buick City, where they worked their way up the union ranks. Joe Niedzwiecki, 599’s current president, said Yettaw was a true trade unionist. “He really believed in Walter Reuther and I think he tried, in his own way, to try and emulate him, to look to his principles. “The bottom line is, he believed in the union.” Yettaw’s work at Buick and inside 599 eventually got him tagged as a dissident under the so-called New Directions platform. That group often challenged the UAW’s leadership and was frequently critical of GM’s moves to outsource work and win tax breaks - issues that remain highly controversial as Michigan and Genesee County continue to shed manufacturing jobs at an alarming rate. Gregg Shotwell, a member of UAW Local 2151 who works as a machine operator for Delphi Corp. in Coopersville on the state’s west side, is an online union activist who often quoted Yettaw. Shotwell’s Live Bait & Ammo postings, at www. greggshotwell. net, often decry what Shotwell sees as the union’s acquiescence to GM and Delphi. “No one loved the UAW more than Dave Yettaw,” Shotwell said in an e-mail. “The next time I sit down to type a flier or stand up to speak at a union meeting, I, like so many others, will feel Dave standing with me shoulder to shoulder. “Dave wasn’t so much my union brother as he was my union father.” Back when Yettaw was 599’s president, other union members publicly said they feared New Directions’ tough stances and Yettaw’s verbal broadsides against the corporation would cost jobs and job security. Today, Buick City has been largely razed by GM. A smattering of plants at the site, now retitled Flint North, still produce engines and parts under the automaker’s Powertrain Division. Buick City is largely gone - in part because of the very trends Yettaw identified and attacked. |