No Concessions! Organize the Unorganized!

Victory to the UAW Strike!

SEPTEMBER 25—Beginning at 11 a.m. yesterday, United Auto Workers (UAW) members streamed out of General Motors plants across the country and set up picket lines. The first nationwide strike against GM since 1970 has brought production at the auto giant to a standstill. With one transmission plant in Windsor, Ontario, already shut down, the strike could also soon further reverberate throughout Canada and in Mexico as well. The Canadian Auto Workers union is refusing to work with GM parts from the U.S., and Teamsters auto haulers are refusing to transport GM vehicles.

The company brought on this battle. It forced the hand of the UAW leadership by refusing to accept anything short of massive concessions, complaining about losing ground to foreign automakers because of high union wages and benefits. Fed up after years of givebacks, auto workers were ready to fight. “If they think I’m going to take a wage cut and pay more for health care, they’re dreaming,” said one Wisconsin striker. As millions of workers see their health and pension benefits ripped up while being made to work harder for less, this strike against a pillar of the capitalist economy is a crucial battle for all of labor. GM brags that its inventories will see the company through a long strike. The entire UAW and the rest of the labor movement must back up the strikers with whatever it takes to beat back GM!

Prior to the walkout, the UAW leadership had already accepted the framework for a major concession on health care. Union negotiators agreed to replace the lifetime employer-paid health care benefit with a union-managed trust, known as a Voluntary Employee Benefit Association (VEBA), which would assume responsibility for GM’s $55 billion health care liability. Under the VEBA, GM would only pay a fraction on the dollar for its liabilities. The balance would likely come out of the pockets of UAW retirees. Not only would this plan put the union in the position of debt collector, but it also opens the door to the union itself cutting benefits if, for example, its investments cannot keep pace with rising medical costs. A hard-fought battle could turn the tide on such concessions and defend hard-won benefits.

The contract negotiations apparently stalled when GM rejected any job security promises, among other issues. Company promises to save jobs are meaningless. Every UAW contract with GM since 1980 has included a job security clause. But a combination of automation, company spin-offs and outsourcing has decimated UAW membership rolls at GM, Ford and Chrysler. In 1980, there were over 350,000 UAW members at GM compared with 73,000 today. Meanwhile, there has been a proliferation of non-union jobs in auto, particularly in the South.

For decades, the overriding concern of the UAW officialdom has been the “competitiveness” of the American automakers against their overseas rivals. UAW head Ron Gettelfinger and his cohorts blame the plight of U.S. automakers on “unfair” foreign trade and currency imbalances, particularly in regard to China. They demand that Washington broker “fair trade” agreements replete with protectionist barriers and hand out subsidies to the “Big Three.”

Here is a crystalline expression of the labor tops’ support to the capitalist profit system and the ambitions of the U.S. ruling class. The UAW tops’ chauvinist protectionism promotes the lie that workers in the U.S. have a common “national interest” with their “own” exploiters and goes hand in hand with their loyal support to the capitalist Democratic Party. It also serves to foment bigotry against Asian and Latino workers, for example when the UAW bureaucracy rails against the “outsourcing” of jobs to other countries. This flag-waving chauvinism is reflected in the current strike with picket signs reading, “Americans Have Rights” and “NAFTA Bankrupts America.” Calls for protectionist measures are doubly pernicious when directed against the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, which the international proletariat must defend against the imperialist powers and against internal counterrevolutionary forces.

To actually protect auto workers’ jobs means fighting the bosses. As a norm, the capitalists will move to exploit cheaper labor where it is available. The growth of the GM empire worldwide points straight to the need for international labor solidarity action. From the standpoint of working-class internationalism, the growth in the ranks of the proletariat in underdeveloped countries means the growth of the international allies of the U.S. working class. In the case of GM, many of its U.S. models are assembled in Mexican plants. When the UAW struck two Flint, Michigan, GM-Delphi parts plants in 1998, GM’s North American assembly network shut down from Mexico through to Canada.

As in 1998, the current strike shows that the UAW still wields significant power despite its declining numbers, which include a large component of black workers and a significant number of women workers as well. In terms of the percentage of auto workers organized, the UAW peaked in the early 1950s. Its greatest number of dues-paying members was reached in 1970, at 1.6 million workers. This year, that number could sink below 500,000, less than half the auto workers in the U.S. At the same time, domestic sales of cars and trucks have grown in recent years, and the vast majority of vehicles sold here are made in the U.S.

Organizing the unorganized is crucial to the very survival of the UAW. A victory against the GM bosses could spark a drive to organize the large and growing number of non-union, mainly foreign-owned plants in the U.S. For example, a strike victory would energize the fight to organize the Toyota Camry plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. The bulk of non-union plants are located in the “right to work” South, where the racist legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation has always served to undercut labor struggle. Any organizing campaign must center on the fight for black rights and take up as well the rights of immigrant workers, a growing component of the U.S. proletariat.

GM’s appetite to crush the union has been whetted by the series of givebacks already granted by the UAW tops, who oversaw the mass layoffs and wage-gouging at Delphi when that company declared bankruptcy. Despite their precarious position, one-third of UAW Delphi workers rejected their rotten contract earlier this summer. In 2005, UAW’s Solidarity House made concessions on retiree health care at GM and Ford followed by job-slashing employee buyouts at the Big Three.

As we wrote during the Delphi bankruptcy crisis in “Defeat Auto Bosses’ Union Busting!” (WV No. 857, 28 October 2005):

“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.”

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.