Born in Michigan, Bieber joined the McInerney Spring and Wire Company, an automotive parts supplier in Grand Rapids, after finishing high school.
His time as president of the union was marked by support of several political causes, including the boycott against South African apartheid and opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
[2][3][4] His father was of German descent and an autoworker at McInerney Spring and Wire Company (an automotive parts supplier) who had co-founded UAW Local 687.
The early 1980s recession and competition from Japanese automakers had cut very deeply into GM's market share, and the company had laid off more than 140,000 of its 330,000 production workers (roughly half its workforce).
leadership", "spoonfeed[ing]" a "captive audience", and perverting the worker participation program into a means to "propagandize or parrot the current views of the chairman of the board of G.M.
[24] The union agreed to enter into talks in January 1982,[21] hoping to win job security commitments for its members in exchange for wage and benefit concessions.
[34] (Additionally, union rules required that any challenger announce his or her candidacy at least 90 days before the election, and take a leave of absence from his or her job in order to run for office.
[31] At its meeting on September 20, the UAW executive board agreed to lift the campaigning moratorium, and set November 12 as the date for choosing its official slate.
[34] Ephlin, however, appeared to be gaining support due to his successful contract negotiations with Ford and his increasingly polished public speaking skills.
[9][38][39][40] Days later, a survey of 130 UAW local leaders in Michigan showed that Ephlin and Bieber had the most grassroots support, with Majerus a distant fourth behind Yokich.
[42] One media report estimated that Majerus had the support of as many as 10 of the 26 board members, while Bieber (whose campaign had been targeting regional directors and workers) may have had as many as 12 votes.
[57] The group successfully overcame vocal opposition from staunch anti-communists on the AFL-CIO executive council to win approval of a resolution that put the labor federation in favor of a negotiated settlement and criticized the Reagan administration of seeking only a military solution.
[58] Later that year, he traveled to South Africa, where he met with several cabinet ministers and angrily demanded that the government release anti-apartheid labor leaders who had been jailed but never charged with any crimes.
[59] His efforts reached a high point in 1993, when Bieber the chief executive officers of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors met with President-elect Bill Clinton—winning Clinton's support for the domestic auto industry.
[64] During the press conference in which he discussed the contract's successful ratification, Bieber fell from the dais and suffered a slight concussion (for which he was briefly hospitalized).
Traditionally, the UAW chose one of the "Big Three" (Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors) automakers as a strike target, and negotiate a contract with that company.
[68] The talks broke down shortly thereafter, and Bieber called a nationwide strike against General Motors on September 14 as the economy continued to perform only weakly.
[75] The two sides reached an agreement (which was successfully ratified) on October 23 that gave autoworkers a $2,120 non-wage bonus, pay increases and wage parity with the GM and Ford, profit sharing, and payments to workers displaced by new technology.
[84] After just seven weeks of bargaining, Bieber announced a contract which gave company workers a 3 percent annual pay increase over two years and a $1,000 bonus.
[85][86] However, the Chrysler contract did contain a historic clause which prohibited the company from issuing cash or stock bonuses to its executives if its employees did not receive payments under the profit sharing agreement.
[109] Tucker, a long-time opponent of joint labor-management committees and work teams, also intended to challenge Bieber's support for these new collective bargaining outcomes at the UAW convention in June.
[115][116] Ford asked for a six-year rather than a three-year agreement, and thereafter gave this goal up and promised instead to increase pension payouts by 17 percent for certain veteran workers.
[61] Instead, in his last years in office Bieber spent significant amounts of his own time lobbying for labor law reform (most importantly, a ban on the permanent replacement of striking workers).
[120] The union also won GM's consent to extend its existing collective bargaining relationship over the new GM-owned Saturn Corporation plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
[126] Moreover, the Canadian leadership felt that giving in to employer demands for "jointedness" (the term of joint quality committees, work teams, profit sharing, and similar initiatives) encouraged the union to collude with management against workers.
[126][128] The Canadian UAW locals at General Motors rejected the contract negotiated by Bieber and his team, and 36,000 union members went out on strike in October.
[127] After two weeks, GM agreed to the Canadian union's demands, which included higher annual wage increases and no work teams, no profit sharing, and no joint labor-management committees.
[110] "In a decade that was a nightmare for union leaders nationwide", as The New York Times described the 1980s, Bieber's performance at the collective bargaining table was generally considered exceptional.
[5] Bieber stepped down as UAW president before the AFL-CIO quadrennial convention in August 1995, however, and left to Yokich the actual job of electing a successor to Kirkland.
Many members of the NAACP board wished to replace Gibson with Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers.