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	Workers Vanguard No. 959	21 May 2010

After Decades of UAW Misleaders’ Betrayals

California NUMMI Auto Plant Axed

On April 1, Toyota shut down the New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI) auto assembly plant in Fremont, California. Some 4,700 employees, including 3,700 members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union were thrown out of work, and tens of thousands of workers in the auto parts supply chain and other businesses could be axed. This is a body blow to the multiracial working class in the San Francisco Bay Area, once a bastion of union power. It is also testimony to the trade-union bureaucracy’s class-collaborationist policies, which are based on the lie of a “partnership” between labor and its capitalist exploiters and their parties, particularly the Democrats, who falsely pose as “friends of labor.”

First opened in 1963 by General Motors, the sprawling Fremont facility was once the biggest auto plant on the West Coast. It was closed in 1982 amid a wave of mass layoffs and plant shutdowns in auto. At the time, class-struggle militants in UAW Local 1364 at the plant fought to mobilize the power of the union to fight against the layoffs and keep the plants open. In a leaflet titled “We Need a Sitdown!”, the Militant Caucus argued that a plant occupation backed up by mass picket lines “would inspire the support of thousands of UAW members industry-wide across the country who are themselves facing layoffs or already on the street.” As a former member of the Militant Caucus wrote in a letter to Workers Vanguard last year (see “UAW Tops Roll Over as Bosses Ax NUMMI Auto Plant,” WV No. 946, 6 November 2009):

“When we called for a sit-down strike, it struck a real chord, especially among a small number of very experienced workers who took up the call and fought for it. Local 1364’s union bureaucrats countered with the argument that these tactics were OK in the 1930s but were now illegal, and union members needed instead to get out the vote for the Democrats. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy’s fearmongering and defeatism prevailed. In all, close to 6,000 auto workers from the Fremont plant were laid off and thrown onto the streets of Reagan’s America.”

In 1984, the Fremont plant was reopened as a joint venture between GM and Toyota. According to the mediator who brokered this partnership, GM wanted to learn Toyota’s innovative production system, and Toyota sought to gain experience running a factory in the United States. As he pointed out, the linchpin for cementing the deal was then-UAW International president Doug Fraser, who “helped persuade Toyota that workers in Fremont would adapt to Japanese production methods” (San Francisco Chronicle, 28 February). The UAW tops imposed an agreement that tore up the old union contract, disbanded Local 1364, which had a reputation for militancy, and replaced it with Local 2244. All former GM workers had to go through a screening process in order to be rehired. In line with Toyota’s “team” concept, workers on the shopfloor were expected to “cooperate” with managers to “solve problems,” undermining the union shop steward system, facilitating speedup and subverting union work rules. The union misleaders instituted a new “partnership” with NUMMI, paving the way for massive speedup and additional labor discipline.

In exchange, the workers were promised “lifetime jobs” in the supposed Toyota tradition. This promise has always been a lie, as NUMMI (like Toyota in Japan and elsewhere in the U.S.) relied heavily on so-called “temporary” workers who could be dismissed at any time. Up to the last day, the Toyota bosses worked to squeeze every last ounce of production out of NUMMI workers. They held out the promise of a “retention bonus” in the form of severance pay as an inducement to keep the assembly line rolling without disruption and then threatened to withdraw the bonus offer. In the end, NUMMI workers were dumped on the recession-ravaged streets with a minimal severance package averaging $54,000, while those on disability, after working countless years on backbreaking assembly lines, are to receive less than $22,000, regardless of seniority.

The response of the bureaucrats to this catastrophe—from the UAW International down to the local officials—was to go begging to the capitalist politicians for redress, coupled with an orgy of flag-waving chauvinism against “foreign” Toyota. This included a petition campaign for a consumer boycott of Toyota and union-organized pickets of Toyota dealerships under the banner “Toyota Is Killing American Jobs.”

This “America First” protectionism poisons international solidarity with foreign workers, scapegoating them for the loss of jobs in the U.S. At the same time, such chauvinism sacrifices the class interests of U.S. workers to those of the union-busting, job-slashing American bosses, concealing the fact that it is the capitalists and their profit system that are responsible for the devastation of labor. For decades, the UAW officialdom has bent over backward to bolster the “competitiveness” of the American automakers. As many angry NUMMI workers themselves noted, the UAW tops gave a free pass to GM, whose pullout from NUMMI last year opened the door for Toyota to dump its only union operation in the country.

GM ended its partnership with Toyota during last year’s “restructuring” of the American auto industry, which was a condition of the massive financial bailout of GM and Chrysler. The purpose of this deal, spearheaded by Obama’s Democratic Party administration, was to restore the profitability of GM and the other U.S. automakers by breaking the back of the UAW. And UAW president Ron Gettelfinger worked hand in glove with Obama to make it happen. As a result, GM closed down 14 plants and laid off some 21,000 workers. Those still employed are subject to intense speedup, while being hamstrung by a six-year no-strike pledge.

In exchange, Gettelfinger accepted 17.5 percent of GM stock, to be held by the retiree health care trust, with a union official taking a seat on the company board of directors. That their own union leaders are stockholders in GM, sitting at the auto bosses’ table where they will have a direct hand in ratcheting up the exploitation of the UAW’s remaining members, was also not lost on many NUMMI workers. As it is now, with GM again starting to turn a profit and ramping up production, it can hire new workers at half as much pay for doing the same work as existing UAW members, by the terms of the sellout contract brokered by the union tops in 2007.

Union bureaucrats like Doug Fraser encouraged Toyota to “export” jobs to the U.S. in the first place by calling for protectionist legislation that would impose harsh trade sanctions if the foreign automakers did not assemble vehicles in the U.S. After starting at NUMMI, Toyota went on to open five non-union plants, four in the “open shop” South. Over the ensuing decades, the UAW tops have steered clear and wide of the necessary class-struggle fight to organize the non-union plants. In testimony before Congress in 2008, Gettelfinger actually boasted that the “gap in labor costs” between the Big Three and the non-union “foreign transplant operations will be largely or completely eliminated.”

In the face of such misleadership, some auto workers turned to “oppositionists” who offer nothing but more of the same rotten program of reliance on the class enemy and its representatives. A case in point is a grouping in Local 2244 around Autoworkers News, a newsletter put out by Local committeeman Juan Castillo, which called to “put pressure on the state politicians to pass the bills that would give incentives to Auto Manufacturing Companies” (28 September 2009) to save NUMMI. While railing against Local officials who amnestied GM, this opposition amnestied Toyota, playing into the hands of the company’s machinations. When Local officials claimed they were holding out for a better severance package, Autoworkers News (11 January) complained that the company’s paltry offer “may be rescinded because of the Union’s position.”

Betrayed by the union bureaucracy, a number of NUMMI workers began to denounce the union as a whole, calling the UAW “Union Against Workers.” Such sentiments are inflamed by the actions of the union bureaucrats. Union officials reportedly called in the cops—the bosses’ strikebreaking thugs—when a January 24 union meeting, for which the opposition had mobilized, dissolved in an uproar. Swooping in like vultures at the union’s February membership meeting were the political bandits of David North’s Socialist Equality Party, who urged the workers to “break with the UAW,” which they consider a “business.” This is music to the ears of Toyota, which has worked hard to keep the UAW out of their non-union plants in the U.S.

It is fatal to identify the sellout bureaucracy with the union as a whole. The answer is not to abandon the unions, the basic defense organizations of the working class against the bosses. What is needed is a political struggle to replace the “labor lieutenants of capital” with a leadership armed with a class-struggle program, one that breaks labor’s chains to the Democratic Party. Such a leadership would prepare the workers for the vitally necessary battles against America’s capitalist masters—from organizing the unorganized to the fight against black oppression and anti-immigrant bigotry.

There is no simple trade-union solution to the crisis in auto that has now claimed the jobs of thousands of NUMMI workers and hundreds of thousands worldwide. It is the product of the entire anarchic and outmoded capitalist system of production for profit, whose inbuilt crises repeatedly and increasingly throw masses of workers on the scrap heap. As we wrote in “Auto Bailout Means Union Busting” (WV No. 931, 27 February 2009):

“The fight for jobs is equivalent to the fight against the devastation of America’s working people. What is necessary is a massive program of public works at union wages to rebuild the dams, bridges and roads that are in an advanced stage of decay; to tear down and replace the crumbling public schools in the nation’s inner cities; to create an America that looks like a place that its inhabitants could survive in. It is necessary to call an end to the layoffs by shortening the workweek at no loss in pay, as part of the struggle for jobs for all.

“All must have full access to medical care at no cost and unemployment benefits must be extended until there are jobs, with all pensions completely guaranteed by the government. Such demands, the elements of which were laid out in the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Trotskyist Fourth International, will not be granted by the rapacious capitalist rulers. The capitalist state exists to defend the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. It cannot be reformed or wielded to serve the interests of working people. The catastrophe of joblessness, threatening the disintegration of the working class, can be effectively fought only by a workers movement led by those committed to the struggle for socialist revolution.”

The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism will not end short of proletarian revolution that takes power out of the hands of the irrational capitalist ruling class and creates a workers state based on a planned, socialized economy. Only the achievement of a world socialist order can eliminate the age-old problems of poverty, scarcity and want. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to help forge the multiracial revolutionary workers party necessary to lead the fight for a workers government that will seize the wealth produced by labor and use it for the benefit of the many, not the profits of a few.