UAW Tops Play by Bosses’ Rules, Again

Bitter Union Defeat at Chattanooga VW Plant

For a Class-Struggle Fight to Organize the South!

In June, for the second time in five years, the United Auto Workers (UAW) narrowly lost a key representation election at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The close vote, 833 to 776, indicates substantial support for the union among the workforce in the face of the fierce anti-UAW campaign unleashed by the VW bosses, state officeholders, the bourgeois media and the business-financed “Southern Momentum” group operating inside the manufacturing facility. There was more than enough basis for a much-needed union victory: Volkswagen is the lowest-paying automaker in the U.S., and unsafe work conditions have brought an epidemic of serious injuries. But the UAW bureaucrats, who have sworn off “adversarial unionism” and pledged their commitment to ensuring VW’s profitability, crippled their own organizing effort.

Having renounced the class-struggle methods that built the union in the first place, UAW officials doubled down on the same entirely legalistic strategy that inflicted the previous defeat in Chattanooga and a long string of other labor setbacks. For years, they retailed the company’s claims of “neutrality” toward unionization as good coin. The truth was always something else entirely. In the weeks prior to the recent vote, workers were subjected to mandatory anti-union meetings, one-on-one confrontations by supervisors and threats to close the plant in the event of a union victory.

The failure of the UAW tops to demonstrate in action the union’s determination to fight in effect gave credence to the fear-mongering by the union-busters to close the facility, which is in fact VW’s only U.S. assembly plant and, moreover, is planning to ramp up production. A union leadership worthy of the name would have mobilized to give union supporters a sense of their collective power. Union-initiated work stoppages in response to deeply felt needs, such as to enforce a slower line speed or to defend victimized temporary workers, could have built the confidence of the workers in the union to defend their interests and jobs.

One thing is certain: a major breakthrough in the South, where the legacy of Jim Crow segregation is a major cudgel against the unions, is not going to come about by playing by the rules dictated by the bosses and their Democratic and Republican political representatives. The pro-capitalist UAW bureaucrats, whose whole perspective is based on the lie that workers and their exploiters share common interests, have done just that every step of the way. Earlier this year when the automaker hatched a legal ploy to block the election, the union tops capitulated by abandoning any claim to represent the 162 maintenance workers at the Chattanooga plant who had voted for UAW representation in 2015 but had never received a first contract because of company stonewalling.

Shortly after the vote tally was announced on June 14, the UAW tops issued a statement proclaiming, “Our labor laws are broken.” No, they are not. The capitalist state’s labor laws did what they were designed to do: keep the unions in check. It cannot be otherwise in a system of production for profit, based on the exploitation of labor. Predictably, the UAW statement called on Congress to fix these laws. The union bureaucracy’s allegiance to the capitalist order and reliance on false “friend of labor” Democrats shackle the potential power of the unions to the class enemy.

The union tops also attach great significance to who sits on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). They especially bemoan “Trump’s NLRB,” whose rulings delayed the recent vote for several weeks, giving Volkswagen more time to bully union supporters into submission. In fact, similar delays and legal chicanery took place before the 2014 representation election loss under Obama’s NLRB. The entire job of the NLRB, irrespective of its makeup, is to ensnare unions in legal proceedings in the interest of class “peace.”

Before the class battles of the 1930s that built the CIO industrial unions, workers had no legally recognized rights as wage slaves. The very right to organize was won through sharp class struggle involving mass pickets, factory occupations and secondary boycotts, often in defiance of anti-labor laws. Major victories for labor came in three 1934 citywide strikes—in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo—all led by Reds intent on fighting it out class against class. Workers won by standing up against the might of the capitalists and their security guards, police and National Guard. The putatively pro-labor legislation signed by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, including the 1935 Wagner Act that established the NLRB, was passed in order to contain militant workers struggle within the framework of capitalist rule.

For the UAW to restore itself as a bastion of union power, there must be a concerted campaign to organize the South, where nearly two dozen assembly plants, and many more parts suppliers, operate union-free. This task is impossible without putting front and center the fight against black oppression, which is the bedrock of American capitalism. Anti-black racism has long served as a wedge between black and white workers and to further the exploitation of all labor. The VW Chattanooga plant, where the majority of the workforce is white, is no exception.

In 2014, anti-union forces put up billboards that defaced the UAW’s name to read “United Obama Workers,” with the “O” word acting as code for the “N” word, and issued propaganda comparing the UAW to the invading Union Army during the Civil War. If only the latter were true! The Union Army, bolstered by the emancipated slaves, smashed the Southern slavocracy on the battlefields. This time around, Southern Momentum and its ilk railed against the “Detroit-based UAW,” a racist dog whistle that is also a not so subtle denunciation of the union as a bunch of Northern “carpetbaggers” (a derogatory term for Radical Republicans in the South during Reconstruction). Meanwhile, Governor Bill Lee, who preached the “union free” gospel to a compulsory meeting of Volkswagen workers on April 29, later decreed July 13 “Nathan Bedford Forrest Day,” celebrating the Confederate general who after the Civil War founded the Ku Klux Klan race-terrorists.

The UAW tops have done damage to the union’s prospects, and not only in the South, by refusing to organize temporary workers, who are roughly one-third of the VW workforce but were excluded from the union vote. In the lead-up to current contract talks with the Big Three automakers, General Motors made known that it wants to employ more temps at its UAW-organized plants. In manufacturing industries, workers hired through temp agencies are more likely to be black or Latino and to earn paltry wages and no benefits, while working on the line alongside permanent employees.

The temp agencies are parasites on behalf of big capital. What is sorely needed is for labor to mobilize its social power based on its central role in production to smash the institution of temporary employment by bringing temps into the unions and winning equal pay and benefits for equal work. By organizing every worker in a plant, the union maximizes the collective strength of the workers in preparation for its future struggles against the bosses. This perspective is linked to the fight for industrial unionism, the principle that all workers in an industry should be organized in a single union regardless of job title, and for the closed shop, where only union members can be hired.

In auto, the atomization of the workforce has been further accomplished by the contracting out of parts production to a vast network of suppliers, which for Volkswagen and other automakers stretches into Mexico. At the same time, in the era of “just in time” manufacturing, each of these plants is a potential choke point; the withholding of labor in any one has the potential to ripple more widely. Earlier this year, in the town of Matamoros, just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, 50,000 workers, most of them women, halted production in 70 maquiladora factories, interrupting the supply of parts to U.S. and foreign automakers (see WV No. 1149, 22 February). The strikers won their demands.

In the case of Volkswagen, the vehicles that roll off the line in Chattanooga contain engines built at its plant in Silao, Guanajuato, where workers went on strike in 2012. The interests of workers on both sides of the border would be considerably advanced by international labor solidarity actions. However, the UAW bureaucrats have for decades poisoned the well with their “American Jobs for American Workers” protectionism, in part to deflect from their complicity in making the U.S. resemble a low-wage manufacturing haven. Such chauvinism only aids the efforts of the auto bosses to pit auto workers in the U.S. against their class brothers and sisters abroad.

What is posed is a fight for a new leadership of the unions, one committed to a class-struggle program and outlook. Such a leadership would prepare the vitally necessary battles against the capitalist exploiters, such as organizing the unorganized and the fight for black rights. It would do everything to break down the racial and other divisions within the working class, while raising the banner of international solidarity. Labor’s chains to the Democrats must be broken, and a workers party forged, a party that aims not simply to improve the lot of the working class, but to rid the world of the system of capitalist wage slavery altogether.