
When General Motors (GM) sued Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) on Wednesday (November 20th), accusing it of corrupting United Auto Workers (UAW) unionists at its expense, the Italian-American group responded by an offended statement.
"We are stunned by this complaint and its schedule. We can only assume that this is intended to disrupt our merger project with (the French company) PSA and our ongoing negotiations with the UAW "Fiat responded, which on Saturday, November 30, signed an agreement in principle on a new four-year collective agreement with UAW. The Italian-American group believes that "GM's complaint is nothing more than a worthless attempt to distract from its own difficulties".
All is not wrong in this reaction: the manufacturer of Detroit (Michigan) comes out of a strike of forty days, suffers from a productivity gap with its competitors and is not unhappy to embarrass FCA at this delicate moment .
But it is especially true that the leaders of the latter have corrupted, for years, union officials of the UAW, as revealed, in 2017, an investigation of the federal police (FBI) that never stops to expose the illegal practices of the union. This led to the resignation of its chairman, Gary Jones (June 2018 to November 2019), whose home was raided in August.
The most insightful case is that of Alphons Iacobelli, former Vice President of Human Resources at Fiat Chrysler, sentenced to five and a half years in prison in 2018 after pleading guilty. He siphoned off funds from a joint training center with the union, the National Training Center, to water the chief union negotiator, General Holiefield, and his wife Monica Morgan: $ 1.2 million (about $ 1.09 billion). at the current conversion rate) between 2009 and 2013, including $ 262,000 to repay a mortgage, first-class airfare, tens of thousands of dollars to charities whose funds were diverted, and a swimming pool.
Mr. Iacobelli had not forgotten, offering himself a $ 350,000 Ferrari 458 spider, two Mont-Blanc pens worth $ 35,700 each, a pool and a new kitchen in his Michigan home.
The goal was to have union interlocutors "Fat, idiots and happy"FBI Jerome Durden, the accountant for the Italian-American firm that made the payments, was sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2018, while a Fiat negotiator, Michael Brown, received a one-year sentence. year.