UAW Must Fight GM/Delphi!

Defeat Auto Bosses' Union Busting!

Delphi, the world’s largest auto parts supplier, and General Motors, the world’s largest automaker, have launched an unprecedented union-busting assault against the United Auto Workers (UAW). Four years into a purported economic recovery based largely on massive layoffs and deadly speedup, U.S. workers are seeing the largest decline in real wages in decades. On October 8, GM spin-off Delphi, which supplies GM with parts, went the corporate bankruptcy route already taken by most major airlines. Delphi’s workers are threatened with destitution, as the company demands that their pay be cut from $27.00 to $10.00 per hour!

On the heels of Delphi’s bankruptcy announcement, GM bosses demanded massive givebacks from the UAW. The treacherous union tops immediately surrendered to GM’s demands, in the name of protecting the mammoth corporation’s sacred “competitiveness.” Current workers and retirees, who broke their backs for GM with six- and seven-day workweeks, are seeing their health care benefits slashed to the tune of $1 billion annually. It was “the largest single cost-cutting initiative ever announced by the company,” and “paves the way for Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler Group to seek similar cost-savings plans with the UAW” (Detroit Free Press, 18 October).

The capitalists deny bankruptcy protection to their victims while wielding the bankruptcy ax to void labor contracts and “reorganize” industry at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Earlier this month, working people across the country stood in long lines desperate to file for bankruptcy before the new law limiting protection from creditors went into effect. Meanwhile, Northwest Airlines declared bankruptcy two months into a strike by AMFA mechanics, who walked off the job rather than accept a 26 percent pay cut. The refusal of the leaders of the other airline unions to shut down Northwest in solidarity with AMFA isolated the mechanics, whose jobs are being taken by scabs. And now every Northwest union is under the gun.

The venality of the capitalist rulers in attacking retirees is as brazen as it is breathtaking. Dubbed capitalism’s “Mr. Fix-It,” Delphi CEO Robert Miller ran workers at Bethlehem Steel through the bankruptcy wringer to slash their benefits and those of retirees and to massively reduce the workforce. Miller blithely told the Wall Street Journal (17 October): “When you worked for one employer till age 65 and then died at age 70, and when health care was unsophisticated and inexpensive, the social contract inherent in defined-benefit programs perhaps made some economic sense.” He continued, “People are living longer these days. Of course, that is a good thing. But the question is, how can we afford it?” Miller’s answer? Work like slaves, then die.

And the UAW tops’ response? Let us dig our members’ graves! On October 18, UAW officials asked a federal court in Detroit to approve the deal with General Motors in order to prevent individual retirees from suing the company for cutting their benefits! GM, naturally, voiced its support for this move. American socialist Daniel DeLeon captured the treachery of the U.S. labor officialdom more than a century ago, branding them the “labor lieutenants of capital.”

Left unchallenged, the effect of Delphi and GM’s assaults on the UAW will be enormous. Layoffs and plant closings are already being threatened, potentially affecting the bulk of the U.S. proletariat. Auto production directly involves coal, steel, rubber, rail and trucking. When Chrysler—now part of the German company DaimlerChrysler—threatened bankruptcy in 1979, the response by the sellouts in the UAW’s Solidarity House was to accept a seat on Chrysler’s board of directors. From this lofty height, UAW chief Doug Fraser shoved concession contracts down workers’ throats with the threat that they better swallow lest they lose their jobs. So they swallowed and lost their jobs. In the last 25 years, GM, Ford and Chrysler have shed some 600,000 jobs in the U.S., and the UAW membership has dropped from 1.5 million to less than 700,000.

But it doesn’t have to happen this way. The rotten GM deal is going to the UAW membership for a vote —vote it down! GM and Delphi workers must fight back, while they have jobs.

In 1998, a walkout at the Flint Metal Center plant, expanding to the Flint East Delphi facility, quickly resulted in the shutdown of 27 of GM’s 29 North American assembly facilities due to lack of parts. “I either stand now and strike or there may be no tomorrow,” one worker said at the time. The strike backed the auto giant down and ended in a stand-off. GM failed to deliver a crippling blow to the union, much to the chagrin of Wall Street investors. GM then contrived to spin off Delphi, and now they’re back for a second try at gutting the UAW. Instead of being picked off one by one, the union must prepare its entire membership for a hard struggle against Delphi, GM and all the auto companies.

Black Rights and Union Rights

In this capitalist society where black people constitute a specially oppressed race-color caste, every assault on union workers hits the black population disproportionately hard. Twenty years ago, one out of every four black workers was a union member. Today that ratio has slipped to close to one in seven. This fact is directly linked to the massive deindustrialization of the U.S., particularly the big urban centers in the Midwest. There has also been a migration of jobs to the low-wage, non-union South and other areas in the U.S. and abroad. Yet the percentage of black people in unions and in basic industry is still proportionately higher than that of whites. In fact, the auto industry has one of the most racially integrated workforces in the U.S. Thus black workers have tremendous potential social power and can play a vanguard role in defending the interests of the entire proletariat through united class struggle.

The question of the unity of the employed and unemployed in this country is the race question. Predatory union-busters have recruited desperate Hurricane Katrina survivors for deployment as scabs against striking hospital workers in San Francisco and against union musicians fighting wage- and benefit-gouging scrooges readying New York City’s Radio City Music Hall for its Christmas extravaganza. Unionized black workers represent a socially powerful link to the ghettoized poor deemed a “surplus population” by the racist rulers.

Key to turning back the assault on the UAW is organizing the auto assembly and parts plants that have proliferated in the South and other non-union areas. The crucial need for the labor movement to take up the fight for black rights comes sharply into focus in any drive to organize the “open shop” South, where the racist legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation has always served to suppress labor struggle. Black and white workers must also champion the rights of immigrants, a growing component of the proletariat, and demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

The rights of black people and union rights march forward together or are thrown back separately. But it’s not as simple as “black and white, unite and fight.” A perspective to turn around the decades of defeat for labor and blacks in this country requires breaking the labor movement from its political subservience to the Democratic and Republican parties of capital. It is urgently necessary for a new labor leadership to be forged in sharp class struggle. Such struggle must take political independence from the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties as its starting point. Break with the Democrats! Build a multiracial, class-struggle workers party!

For International Labor Solidarity!

In his Wall Street Journal interview, Robert “let ’em die” Miller said that as far as he was concerned, the job of UAW head Ron Gettelfinger is “to help half a million of workers get used to the idea that globalization has taken away the ability to have someone who mows the lawn or sweeps the floor get $65 an hour.” Miller drips ruling-class contempt, acting like the working class is dust under his feet. Auto workers built the gleaming machines that drive the “American Dream.” They built the Motor City that the capitalists have done their best to run into the ground. They created the fabulous wealth appropriated as profits by parasites like Miller and his class.

“Globalization” lingo is designed to mask the historic workings of imperialist capitalism: the carving out of new markets; the extraction of more profit through exploitation of labor abroad while simultaneously driving down wages and shutting factories at home; defense of “national interests” through trade wars and shooting wars. The U.S. auto industry has operations throughout the world. Earlier this year, bosses at GM’s Opel plants in Germany told workers to take wage and benefit cuts along with more forced overtime under the pretext of keeping the company competitive. Instead of the labor tops’ poisonous “America first” protectionism and support to American imperialist military adventures, U.S. workers need to forge international class-struggle solidarity.

The screaming about rising health care and wage costs is corporate propaganda in the service of union-busting. Meanwhile, Delphi, GM et al. rake it in with their subsidiaries and international operations. The unions should fight for free, quality health care for all! For jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay! Against the anarchy of capitalist production, we fight for workers revolutions to establish an international planned socialist economy.

Fight or Starve!

GM/Delphi’s attack on the UAW is a potential watershed for all workers. A fight against these vicious exploiters, by workers in the very heart of the industrial economy, would resonate among working people desperate to achieve or hold on to health care and pensions. U.S. imperialism’s brutal occupation of Iraq has generated widespread revulsion. The Bush gang’s cronyism, lethal incompetence and open racist hatred for the poor, largely black population of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina shocked millions. The capitalist profit system was revealed to be utterly incapable of providing even the minimal necessities of life. Throwing youth into prisons while smashing public education, enforcing the racist death penalty and destroying welfare and social programs has been the capitalists’ standard operating policy for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The U.S. ruling class has looted the wealth of this country and sabotaged its vital infrastructure by refusing to invest in and modernize basic industry like steel and auto, mortgaging the future of this society for short-term gains. That’s fundamentally why GM keeps building gas-guzzling, unsafe models like the notorious tip-over SUVs, and why it’s quality Japanese and German autos that consumers increasingly want to buy. Highways, levees, schools, hospitals, mass transit—it’s all been run into the ground. The capitalist system deserves to perish.

But for this to happen requires forging a revolutionary workers party that will rip power out of the hands of the exploiters and create a society organized to meet human needs, not private profit. Our model is the 1917 Russian Revolution, led by Leon Trotsky’s and V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. The only way to guarantee good living conditions, jobs for all and an end to capitalist exploitation and racist oppression is by expropriating the capitalist class through socialist revolution. As Trotsky wrote in the 1938 Transitional Program, founding document of the Fourth International:

“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. ‘Realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’ is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”