The attacks coming down on workers are of historical proportions. Since the late 1970s, there has been a steady erosion of working people’s living standards. Real wages have dropped and budget cuts have destroyed social programs. Now, that slow erosion has turned into an avalanche of cuts, and workers in the auto industry are right in the way of the corporate path of destruction.
Delphi, the biggest car parts supplier in the U.S., has announced its desire to cut workers’ wages by over 60%, with many workers possibly seeing their paychecks slashed from $27/hour to $9/hour. Under the plan, 24,000 of 34,000 workers are threatened with layoffs.
Last July, Delphi hired Steve Miller as its CEO and paid him a $3 million signing bonus. CEO wages skyrocket as a reward for carrying out cuts, while the workers (who actually produce the products!) are asked to suffer.
On January 16 of this year, Ford announced its intent to lay off 30,000 workers out of a workforce of approximately 87,000. GM has also announced plans to cut 30,000 workers. Like other Americans, auto workers are seeing bosses attempt to dismantle workers’ healthcare and pension benefits. Auto companies are freezing pensions and forcing workers to cough up hefty co-payments for doctor’s visits.
The cuts in healthcare are particularly damaging to workers who endure physical strain on the production line; many auto workers can measure their seniority on the job by the amount of surgeries they’ve undergone for work-related injuries.
Turmoil in the UAW
Unfortunately, while corporations are carrying out a gigantic attack on workers, the United Auto Workers (UAW) leadership has, so far, not carried out or prepared for any serious fight. UAW leaders make much more money than the workers they’re paid to represent.
In 2003, the UAW leadership signed an agreement allowing Delphi to cut new hires’ wages to $14/hour. A deal in December 2005 to raise drug co-payments for union workers at Ford and charge monthly healthcare premiums to Ford-UAW retirees squeaked by earlier this month with only 51% of the workers voting for it, well short of the 80% or more typical for leadership-backed initiatives.
Many UAW workers and plant-level union officials are questioning the accuracy and integrity of the vote tally. Corruption and concessions go hand in hand for the UAW misleadership.
These leaders have not come up through a tradition of struggle. They’ve been trained in business unionism, cooperation with management, and negotiating concessions that hurt workers. It appears the current UAW leadership would rather switch sides in the fight than put up the necessary struggle needed to win.
Although the UAW leadership is not preparing workers for actions to defend jobs, wages, and benefits, a movement has started from below. Rank-and-file workers organizing against concessions call themselves “Soldiers of Solidarity” (SOS).
SOS has vowed not to let the lives of their families and communities be destroyed without a fight. Gregg Shotwell, a Michigan Delphi worker who has spearheaded the rank-and-file organizing, explains: “This is our generation’s historical moment. The future of the union depends on what we do now.”
SOS has organized mass meetings in Flint, Grand Rapids, and Bay City, MI; Kokomo, IN; Lockport, NY; St. Louis, MO; Milwaukee, WI; and other areas. These were the largest rank-and-file meetings of auto workers in years, with regularly over 150 workers in attendance. Public rallies of 500-1,000 workers have also been organized in upstate New York, central Indiana, and Detroit.
The struggle of Soldiers of Solidarity has inspired auto workers and other trade unionists around the country and the world. Messages of support have come in from every corner of the planet. As the corporations try to exert their dominance throughout the world, more and more working people everywhere are facing attacks on living conditions. Particularly now, after Hurricane Katrina and the cutbacks faced by American workers, many people around the world are beginning to see through the false picture that is painted of the U.S. as a society with no poverty and general prosperity.
Death of the Dream
The American Dream has been killed alongside the three million decent manufacturing jobs that have been slaughtered in the past five years. Anyone who wants to see its corpse can visit Detroit. For many people, particularly millions of African Americans and other people of color, the “American dream” was never anything more than a nightmare. However, in the period after World War II, the possibility of advancement and the achievement of a decent standard of living seemed real to many workers.
There was a huge economic boom after World War II. Corporations were making huge profits and felt the economy would continue to grow. This gave the bosses more room to give some concessions to workers than before, but none of the gains made by working people were achieved without militant struggle, including strikes, mass pickets, and workers’ demonstrations.
For a while, many workers could live comfortably, get healthcare, and save up enough to send their kids to college and have a decent retirement. Auto workers, who won their decent living standards through massive strikes led by rank-and-file organizers, became the symbol of the American Dream.
All that began to change with the sharp recession in the mid-70s. Big business was compelled to launch a major offensive throughout the U.S. and around the world to drive down wages and benefits and reduce their taxes to try to maintain their profits in a period of economic crisis.
Thirty years later, after many waves of givebacks and with another recession on the way, most of the union leaders either don’t want to or don’t know how to fight, and the living conditions of workers are in decline .
As awful as Bush is, everything can’t just be blamed on him. We should remember that under Clinton the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed and the World Trade Organization (WTO) was set up, resulting in many corporations moving production to Mexico and other poor countries to get cheap labor. Clinton also ended welfare as we knew it. In the Clinton years, the prison population nearly doubled to reach two million.
These attacks have intensified under Bush. Forty-six million Americans are without health coverage. One-third of households are in credit card debt. Many more are struggling to pay off loans or re-mortgaging their homes. It has become the norm to work two or three jobs without benefits. Young workers have limited options: poverty wages at a dead-end job, hustling on the street and ending up dead or in jail, going to fight in a war for oil, or racking up debt from school that you’ll probably never be able to pay off. High gas prices and home heating costs aren’t helping, either.
The gutting of the auto industry is a nail in the coffin for the dream that has alluded so many and become a nightmare for so many more.
Offensive Against Auto Workers
The proposed cuts at Delphi aren’t happening just because Steve Miller is a heartless jerk (which he is). These attacks are symptomatic of a system that only cares about profits. To make profits, bosses try to keep wages and benefits low. Bosses reinvest these profits into building more factories and buying more machinery to make more goods at a cheaper cost. But since workers aren’t paid enough wages to allow them to buy back all the things they produce, the system creates crises of overproduction. It’s the system that creates the crisis.
The bosses’ “solution” to overproduction and overcapacity is to ruin lives by shutting down plants. Workers can organize for a better solution. If the bosses say there isn’t enough work for all who are currently employed, then lower the working week and spread the work around without cutting our pay. We should not accept that layoffs or plant closings are “inevitable.”
Unionized auto workers around the world are part of a global “race to the bottom” in wages and benefits. The corporations have created this race, and they’re the only ones winning. We’ve seen unionized auto jobs slashed in England, Germany, and elsewhere.
Car manufacturing in the U.S. is not in trouble. Production has actually gone up. It’s workers’ pay that has gone down. While in 1978, 82% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. and Canada were produced by union labor, today it has slipped to 60%. The parts sector is now 80% non-union. Organizing non-union plants has to be part of the strategy to save decent jobs. Workers will be inspired to unionize if they see unions carrying out a struggle actually worth fighting for rather than a leadership lying down and accepting concessions.
A Strategy to Fight Back
The hardships faced by auto workers affect all of us. If the auto workers successfully win their battle, this will be a huge step toward stopping the overall offensive of big business against working people. Having defeated their attacks, we can begin to go on the offensive ourselves and make real gains. Therefore, we need to see this struggle as a fight for the future of all working people.
The support of the wider working class will be crucial to the struggle begun by Soldiers of Solidarity. Refusing to cross picket lines, refusing to transport stockpiled car parts, and organizing solidarity demonstrations and actions (including secondary strikes) could be of massive importance in the events to come. We also need to build a nationwide mass movement for healthcare and pensions.
On the shop floor, SOS is putting forward the militant strategy of “work to rule.” This means that workers do no more than what is strictly required. No extra help is given to the boss in any way. This helps to undermine Delphi’s strategy of stockpiling to ride out a strike. In reality, helping the boss to stockpile while you’re working can lead to scabbing on yourself when you’re on strike. Work to rule gives workers a strategy for determining the conditions in their workplace. It also protects consumers because when workers aren’t forced to speed up production we get better quality products.
Working people produce everything, distribute everything, and provide all the services that make society run. Corporations and politicians get rich from our hard work. If we refuse to work then society shuts down, as the recent transit strike in New York City showed. Through determined struggle, we can win.
We need unions and a political party that fight for our interests. Local struggles on the shop floor are connected to the national political struggle for healthcare, education, and pensions. To win these demands, we need our own political voice – a mass workers’ party completely independent from the two parties of big business.
These Soldiers of Solidarity are not just engaged in any old battle. Make no mistake about it – they are on the frontlines of a war that the bosses and their politicians have brought to our doorstep. If we fight back, then we might win. If we don’t fight, then we know we’ll lose. The strike is the greatest weapon in our arsenal, but it needs preparation. We need to be armed with everything we can get our hands on, including broader working-class support and political representation.
There is only one final victory possible for us in this war between working people and big business. To really win, once and for all, we need to transform society so that it is based on human need, not corporate greed. If capitalism can’t afford decent wages, healthcare, and pensions, then we can’t afford this system.
Read more on-line:
www.futureoftheunion.com
www.soldiersofsolidarity.com
www.flintsolidarity.com