1665 Lange v. UAW Ford Dept.

Lange lost all recall rights to Ford Motor Company once she broke seniority in 1981.  She would have given up her March 9, 1987, Ford Motor Company seniority date if she had transferred back to Rawsonville when the former Rawsonville employees were rehired in 1998. She may have been willing to forfeit her seniority in order to work closer to home, but it was not a contractual right.  She had no right under the UAW-Ford National Agreement to notice whenever Rawsonville hired new employees because she had no recall rights to that plant.  When the twenty-five former Ford employees were contacted in 1998 about employment at Rawsonville, the representatives involved would quite naturally have assumed that people who were hired by Mazda and established seniority under the Ford Agreement in 1987 did not want to abandon those jobs and return to Rawsonville in 1998 with day one seniority. 

The UAW-Ford SUB Fund properly recovered from Lange payments she had received under the TRA in accordance with the terms of the Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Agreement and Plan contained in the National Agreement.  The parties may have neglected to collect this debt when the Rawsonville employees were rehired, but any such oversight would not affect Lange’s obligation.