MIAMISBURG

Tier contracts tear workers apart

* The top and bottom pay scales are so far apart, the disparity builds animosity among the workers

It should have been one of the most gratifying moments of O.D. Robinson's life.

Thirty years after Robinson left Vietnam for a job in a General Motors Corp. parts factory in Moraine, his 22-year-old son Jason began working the same assembly lines that helped O.D. build a life and raise a family.

But Jason may not be there long. He started out making $9.49 an hour - less than his father made doing the same job in 1979 - and is attending night school in hopes of finding a better-paying job.

O.D. Robinson looks on while his son Jason does the final assembly on an air-conditioning compressor at Delphi Harrison. Jason completes about 200 of these units per hour on the job. He started out making $9.49 an hour - less than his father made doing the same job in 1979. `We got sold out in the contract and there's really nothing young workers like me can do to stop it,' Jason said. SKIP PETERSON / DAYTON DAILY NEWS

`We got sold out in the contract and there's really nothing young workers like me can do to stop it,' Jason said. `I'm pro-union, and I respect guys like my dad for trying to protect our jobs. But what kind of jobs are they trying to protect?"

The Robinsons are among thousands of families with children or parents, aunts, uncles and other relatives in Dayton-area auto plants who have found themselves separated by income, ideals and a corporate cost-cutting strategy that companies insist is necessary to preserve jobs.

At 53, O.D. Robinson has two sons, two grandchildren, a $150,000 home in Miamisburg, a small Ohio farm, four horses and a scratchless 1998 Chevy Tahoe that takes him to work at the same Gm Delphi Harrison Thermal Systems plant he entered three decades ago.

He credited his labor union, Gm and his $21.08 hourly wage for leading him along the road to what he considers the `American Dream.'

Meanwhile, Jason and millions more in his generation can't count on that same dream. Because of a tiered contract that puts new workers on a lower pay scale for a generation into the future, it would take Jason 17 years to join his father and older workers at the top of the pay scale.

Tiered-wage contracts washed away much of the attraction young workers had for the Midwest's manufacturing jobs. While those jobs still pay older workers well through retirement, newer workers in Robinson's plant earn about $4 over minimum wage.

"If I made what my dad did, I'd be tempted to stay in the plant," Jason said. "But I never wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps and I know my future's not in a factory."

The father

He feels his generation sold out a younger generation.

Robinson's union, led by guys he's stood next to his entire life, voted to cut the pay for younger workers while maintaining their own $20-an-hour wages.

`I voted against it, and I tried to talk everyone that would listen into voting against it because it wasn't unionism,' said Robinson, who has been a union shop committeeman for five years. `I think those contracts suck and not just for the guys in the plant. Gm has 20,000 people employed in Dayton, and, if half of them are working for $8 to $10 an hour, what does that do to the rest of the economy in this area? What does that leave for young people like my son?'

Wearing well-worn, loose-fitting blue jeans and an Iue T-shirt, the 6-3, 265-pound Robinson would look at home in any union tavern.

But like many blue-collar workers today, Robinson is as comfortable talking about the stock market as he is talking about his auto plant. His television usually stays tuned to Cnbc, the cable business channel, so he can monitor the market, and he often calls home from the plant in the afternoon to check on the progress of his stocks.

`I've had pretty good success in the market, and that wouldn't have been possible without Gm,' he said. `But I doubt kids like my son will have the same chances I've had.'

For Robinson's generation, working for Gm was the envy of the nation's blue-collar work force, and jobs such as his are still considered the hallmark of equal treatment and cradle-to-grave job security despite temporary layoffs in some of the past economic recessions.

O.D. was 4 years old and the youngest of seven children in 1949 when his family moved from Kentucky to Miamisburg, where his father got a job shoveling coal at the municipally-owned Miamisburg Power Plant.

When he turned 18, he left high school before graduation and enlisted for four years in the Navy. The Navy helped him complete his high school education and then sent him to Vietnam - a subject Robinson discusses with no one.

When he returned home to Miamisburg at age 22, Robinson was more interested in earning money than a college degree. So he walked over to one of Gm's former Frigidaire plants and was hired on the spot for $2.94 an hour. He waited just 90 days to make top scale - close to $4 an hour - and he has received full health benefits since then.

Robinson was 26 when he got his first glimpse at a tiered contract.

`It was 1971 and Frigidaire laid off hundreds of workers,' he recalled. `The company cut a deal with the union that brought them all back into the plant, but they would earn a quarter an hour less than everyone else.'

`A quarter was a lot of money back then where you're making $4.50 an hour. It's tough working side-by-side with someone who's doing the same thing for less money. It creates a lot of hard feelings.'

By 1979, Robinson was making about $10 an hour, more money than his son Jason started earning last year.

The son

`I wanted him in college and working toward a career, not down on the (factory) floor,' he said.

Jason took a $2.50-an-hour pay cut in January 1997 when he started working full-time at the Delphi plant, where he had earned more money as a part-time summer worker.

`Most of the people I got hired in with thought, `This is Gm, I'm gonna make $13 an hour,' but they got a rude awakening,' Jason said. `A lot of people with kids had to get a part-time job a few months after they got in at Gm.'

Jason's needs are pretty basic. He owns a color television and stereo system. He lives with his parents. He drives a dented 1985 Chevy Blazer given to him by his dad. And his parents pick up half the monthly payments for a full-size 1995 Chevy pick-up truck.

His personal life has all the trappings of a typical `Generation Xer.' He likes to drink beer, chase girls and act like a teen-ager in his `down' time. His parents travel to Las Vegas twice a year, but the younger Robinson hasn't been outside of Ohio since he was 12.

He's typical in one other sense: he can make more with an education than assembling parts on a factory floor.

Jason takes night classes at Sinclair Community College, where he has a `B' average and intends to receive an associate degree in electrical engineering by next spring.

"I want to be the guy designing parts in cars, not the guy putting them together all my life," he said.

Growing anger

`None of them will admit to it,' Jason said.

O.D. said younger workers visit his union office at the plant nearly every day with the same complaints and the same questions:

* How did we get this contract?

* Why did the union accept this?

* Can we do anything to change it?

There's not much Robinson can say.

"I tell them I'm sorry. I tell them that I don't like the tiers any more than they do, but once a union accepts a contract you have to live up to it."

But with each confrontation, Robinson said he senses a growing anger and frustration among the younger workers in the plant.

`The young kids want us old guys out of there, and truly that's what should happen," he said. "The kids aren't gonna take this forever.'