Governor Dayton’s Baleful Influence on Labor Relations
By Greg Gardner, Detroit Free Press
Two former UAW officers from a Pontiac local were sentenced Monday for conspiring to commit extortion in an 8-year-old case resulting from a strike 14 years ago at a General Motors truck plant in Pontiac.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds sentenced Donny Douglas, 70, a former UAW international representative, to 18 months in prison. Jay Campbell, 70, a former president of UAW Local 594 in Pontiac, was sentenced to 12 months and one day. Both were convicted by a jury in 2006 on charges that they agreed to settle an 87-day strike at a GM Pontiac truck plant in 1997 only after GM agreed to hire Campbell’s son, Gordon, and Todd Fante, son-in-law of former UAW Local 594 official Clarence Powell.
Neither the younger Campbell nor Fante were technically qualified for the skilled trades jobs, which paid as much as $150,000 a year, or about twice what a veteran UAW production worker earns and nearly quadruple what an entry-level UAW worker makes today.
