Fired by Company, Betrayed by Union Tops

Reinstate Freightliner Five Now!

No to Lawsuit Against UAW! Government Out of the Unions!

Fired for leading a strike in April 2007, five activists in United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 3520 at the Daimler-owned Freightliner truck manufacturing plant in Cleveland, North Carolina, have been fighting since then to win back their jobs. Known as the “Freightliner Five,” Robert Whiteside, Allen Bradley, Franklin Torrence, Glenna Swinford and David Crisco were all members of the local’s eleven-person bargaining committee that initiated the walkout after the company tried to foist a giveback contract on them. With the battle lines drawn, the UAW International stepped in to do the company’s dirty work, sabotaging the strike and then launching a campaign to drive the Five out of the union. All of labor should take up the cause of the Freightliner Five and demand the reinstatement of their jobs and restoration of their union membership and offices. A victory in this struggle would further the cause of organizing the open shop South.

With the legal proceedings to regain their jobs stalled in arbitration, the Five have toured the country in recent months to build solidarity. In response, union locals have passed motions in support of the Freightliner Five and a number of labor officials, including the AFL-CIO’s head in South Carolina, have spoken out on their behalf. But there has been no real defense campaign by the labor movement, including by mobilizing union members in the region, on behalf of the Freightliner Five.

Meanwhile, surrounded by the likes of Ellis Boal, a contemptible union-suing lawyer with the social-democratic Labor Notes, and the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Freightliner Five two weeks ago filed a lawsuit against the UAW in federal court, an act counterposed to their own defense and their fight for union struggle. We oppose on principle suing the unions based on our opposition to any intervention by the capitalist state into the labor movement. Inviting the class enemy to meddle in the labor movement opens the unions up for control by the bosses. In this case, the judge moved quickly to order Local 3520 to produce financial records and other documents. Labor must clean its own house! Capitalist government and state agencies out of the unions!

The UAW bureaucrats’ betrayal of the Freightliner Five stems from the union tops’ class collaborationism. Ever since the plant’s opening in 1989, the volunteer organizing committee, which included four of the Five, had worked tirelessly to bring in the UAW. Local 3520 was finally founded in 2003 after wage cuts and health benefit cost increases spurred workers to join the union. But unknown to the workers, the UAW International had brokered a secret “pre-agreement” with the company, granting significant wage and benefit concessions in exchange for a pledge of management “neutrality” in its organizing efforts at Freightliner’s Carolina plants. At the time, UAW head Stephen Yokich sat on the DaimlerChrysler board of directors, as did his successor Ron Gettelfinger until Daimler sold off Chrysler last spring.

Preaching reliance on company “neutrality” while tying the workers to the class enemy, especially through support to the capitalist Democratic Party, the UAW tops oppose wielding the sort of class-struggle tactics that built the union in the first place: mass pickets, sit-down strikes, secondary labor boycotts. As the U.S. auto bosses slash jobs and shut down plants, the UAW bureaucracy rails against the “outsourcing” of jobs, peddling poisonous protectionist chauvinism. This has served to defeat one strike after another, including by granting concessions to make U.S. companies more “competitive.” For example, ending a 12-week strike at American Axle, the UAW tops signed a tentative sellout agreement containing massive wage cuts, plant closures and other concessions. The way forward is to engage in class struggle and to forge bonds of international labor solidarity.

At the Cleveland Freightliner plant, the UAW tops stabbed their own organizers in the back to enforce the sweetheart pre-agreement deal! The year 2006 was one of record profits for the company. But when the first contract expired in early 2007, the terms of this pre-agreement still applied. With national contract negotiations looming at the Big Three automakers, then including DaimlerChrysler, the UAW International worked behind the scenes with the company to shove a new giveback contract down the throats of the Freightliner workers.

However, the local bargaining committee solidly rejected the company’s “final offer,” which left many health and safety issues unsettled at a plant where workers face dangerous working conditions and high injury rates. Among the concessions was a two-tier wage structure, which pits newer workers against those with more seniority. Such multi-tier schemes also go hand in hand with racist discrimination. At the Cleveland plant, almost all the “top tier” jobs are worked by white men, and management regularly attempts to reinforce divisions along racial and gender lines. Against the labor bureaucrats’ accommodation of such discrimination, the unions must fight to smash the bosses’ schemes to pit workers against each other.

When Freightliner broke off negotiations and informed workers that they no longer had the protection of a union contract, the local bargaining committee initiated the walkout. With the International refusing to sanction the strike, Local 3520 president George Drexel sent a voice mail message to workers calling it off. Soon after, Freightliner terminated the eleven members of the bargaining committee. Six of the eleven were later allowed to return to their jobs, but only after signing “model employee” agreements and a statement that they had been misled by the Five into calling the strike. Meanwhile, workers rejected the proposed contract, which didn’t include the health and safety gains sought by the bargaining committee. To get it passed, Freightliner announced layoffs and Drexel & Co. orchestrated a second vote on company property, from which the Five were barred.

Acting as an agent of the International, Drexel ramped up the attacks on the Five. There was an attempt to suspend them from union office in an internal union trial last November. But they were acquitted, showing the wide support for these union leaders among the membership. Earlier this year, Drexel brazenly announced that the Five were no longer union members in good standing, even though they had earlier verified with the local treasurer that their back dues were paid. He barred them from the February 16 local meeting, and even called in cops to eject them. Allen Bradley was arrested for trespassing and still faces jail time. This is an outrage! The union-busting cops, the enforcers of racist American capitalism, have no place at a union meeting or in the labor movement. Drop the charges now! Cops out of the unions!

With the International endlessly delaying an internal union appeal to restore their membership, the Freightliner Five filed suit in the capitalist courts to compel the union to reinstate them. Make no mistake: the cops and courts are both direct agents of the class enemy, the core components of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the bourgeoisie’s rule and profits. If the strike at the Cleveland plant had continued, the cops would have patrolled the pickets, herding scabs, while the courts issued strikebreaking injunctions. It took bitter, bloody struggles against the capitalists and their cops, courts and troops, as well as against armies of private security and the Ku Klux Klan, to build the trade unions.

Four of the Freightliner Five were among those endorsing the Partisan Defense Committee-initiated united-front protests last month demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Glenna Swinford spoke powerfully at the rally in Chicago, observing: “The justice system has failed him, but he still keeps fighting for his freedom, and the Freightliner Five will continue to fight for ours.” The same courts that have kept Mumia on death row for over 25 years are also the enemies of unions and workers who engage in class struggle. It is wrong for the Freightliner Five, union leaders and civil rights activists, to take their dispute with the corrupt and venal UAW International to the capitalist courts.

In fact, anti-union Freightliner workers filed a RICO racketeering lawsuit against the UAW in 2006. RICO was the main lever by which the capitalist state assumed sweeping powers over a number of unions in the 1980s and ’90s. The 1989 RICO-inspired government takeover of the powerful Teamsters was the culmination of a decades-long union-busting vendetta by the Feds, beginning in the 1960s with Democrat Robert Kennedy, against the union and James Hoffa Sr.

To this end, the Feds were aided and abetted by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) “opposition,” in which the ISO and its predecessor, the International Socialists, were active (see “Association for Union Democracy: Lawyers for Government Union-Busting,” WV No. 738, 30 June 2000). Ellis Boal, a TDU lawyer, has for decades dragged the Teamsters, UAW and other unions into the courts. For its part, the ISO, one of the sponsors of the Freightliner Five’s tours, presents the Freightliner Five lawsuit as if it were a part of “the struggle for democracy within Local 3520” (Socialist Worker, 14 May). The government’s aim in going after the unions is not to eliminate corruption or introduce “democracy,” as the fake leftists would have it, but to cripple them and gut their power. That power was on display in the solid 1997 strike against UPS, after which the government escalated its anti-union crusade by driving TDU-supported Teamsters president Ron Carey out of the union (Carey himself was installed in office in 1991 under the aegis of the federal government).

The Freightliner Five lawsuit was brought under the Landrum-Griffin Act, an amendment to Taft-Hartley that was enacted in 1959 primarily to shackle the Teamsters by rendering illegal those provisions in its contracts that gave workers the right to refuse to handle struck goods. The labor laws in this country are stacked against militant workers and designed to drag the unions into disputes before the courts. When a court rules in favor of a worker’s grievance against a union, the purpose is to increase the state’s stranglehold on the labor movement and to create union leaders who owe their positions to the government.

To reverse the assault on labor requires a fight inside the unions against the class collaboration of the pro-capitalist misleaders. The starting point must be the total independence of the unions from the capitalists, their political parties and their state. This is the precondition for union democracy, which is essential for hammering out the most effective means for the labor movement to go forward. What is necessary is the forging of a class-struggle leadership in the unions as part of the fight for a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government. Down with government intervention in the unions! No to the lawsuit against the UAW! Reinstate the Freightliner Five now!