Has the UAW leadership gone completely mad?

Left:  Former UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, joining the auto bosses, former General Motors CEO  Richard Wagoner,  Ford CEO Alan Mulally, and CEO Robert Nardelli, begging (and receiving) billions form the taxpayers. What a disgusting scene.

 The Wall Street Journal reports today that the UAW leadership is launching an organizing drive at the foreign owned plants. It’s an important enough event that the journal seeks the advice of the “go to” academic on Labor issues, Harley Shaiken of the University of California Berkeley. “I think this is an unprecedented effort by the UAW and pivotal to its survival” says Shaiken. “Unprecedented effort”. Wow! Let’s check this out.

As I read the details of this “unprecedented effort” on the part of the UAW leadership I think to myself, “Is this real? Has the Labor bureaucracy gone completely mad?”

Bob King, UAW president promises the auto bosses hat the UAW will take a “much less confrontational approach to foreign car makers than it did decades ago in battles to become established at the big three.”  It seems the major issue for King and the UAW leadership is for the Union to “ensure what it calls free and fair Union elections.” According to the journal, the plan is to hold demonstrations at the corporate offices of the foreign companies as well as picket dealerships and sports events that they sponsor if they bosses don't help them unionize their plants.

There’s nothing wrong in general with these tactics if they are a supplement to stopping production which is not mentioned at all by Bob King, and if the Union is actually fighting for something. The Union has “deep pockets” King says, he goes even further claiming that the Union has “unlimited resources”. Members are not unlimited, that's for sure as the UAW has lost thousands of members as the leadership of this once proud Union has capitulated to the employers every step of the way.

Gettelfinger, King and Ford CEO Mullally stabbing workers in the back

I don’t agree that the dominant reason for this capitulation is the obscene salaries that Union officials earn as some argue. This is a factor but a secondary one. The main problem is that the leadership accepts the employers’ view of the world. They accept the laws of the market and that workers have to compete in order to help their employers win market share from their competitors whether the competitors are foreign or domestic. The name they give this in the movement is the Team Concept, and every top Union official supports it. It would be better known as the Stab Fellow Workers in the Back Concept.

As they always do, the bosses blame workers’ wages for the economic crisis and the Union officials also have this view. If its not our wages its our benefits or our social services or our vacations, whatever. The autoworkers wages and benefits have been blamed for the bailouts of the US auto industry that cost the taxpayers billions. But the cause of the crisis is the system itself; it’s a crisis of capitalism.And any response we have has to deal with changing the system that is the cause of the crisis.

“Generous benefits and cumbersome work rules” (cumbersome means those that protect worker safety but hinder profit taking) are what many saw as the cause of the demise of GM and Chrysler says the Journal. Bob King and the UAW leadership don’t have a problem with that; that’s why they support concessions as all the top trade Union leaders do; their members have to work cheaper and faster than the competition. The top Union officials see themselves as Labor brokers, getting the best price of Labor power for the capitalists; as I’ve said before, they view the Unions as employment agencies and themselves as the CEO’s. The UAW along with the entire leadership of organized Labor views the  Union as a business partner. “UAW officials now take credit for the Union’s cooperative role, arguing it helped improve profitability, worker productivity and vehicle quality at the Detroit Three.” The WSJ writes. That’s why the only issue for the Union tops is members which means more revenue; “growing the business” as they say.

This new “unprecedented” strategy (what does it say about the esteemed professor that he says nothing about this disastrous strategy other than its unprecedented?) will attempt to convince non-unionized workers that “a company with UAW representation is better equipped to compete in an increasingly competitive auto market.” Wow! What a great idea, what a selling point. I’d join up right away if I got a flier with such revolutionary ideas on it.

Mr. King and his leadership of UAW militants will be presenting a list of 11 principles to the non-unionized employers. Here is the one that is incredible when you think about it. Bob King, (who is a trained attorney which is one of the problems in the Labor movement) and the intellectual leaders of the UAW with all their lawyers and academic advisers want the bosses, and the Union, to agree to a provision that “Both Union and management will avoid promising better wages or benefits based on a workers vote for or against the UAW.”

 Wait a minute! Am I reading this right? The crux of this organizing strategy, that, according to a very educated and smart professor, is an “unprecedented” strategy that is “pivotal” for the UAW’s survival, includes promising the employer that the Union won’t organize around higher wages and better benefits but that the Union will help the members compete with other workers to make more money for their boss. So joining the Union won’t mean more pay and benefits for the member, but it will mean money they have to shell out for Union dues, so they’ll definitely earn less.

It’s bad enough that the UAW leadership is foolish enough to think that the boss will abide by a principle that they will not coerce intimidate or threaten workers who want to join a Union; no worker believes that, but to openly agree to not mentioning wages and benefits in an organizing drive shows how bad things really are.

The average Union member, or worker in general would see the absurdity of being asked to join a Union and promising the boss not to make wages and benefits an issue. They might think indeed that the Union leaders have gone completely mad. But they are not mad, and most workers think the reason for their collaboration with the boss is corruption, the taking of money. This occurs no doubt; we live in a corrupt society. But the main issue is that the Labor leaders are corrupt ideologically. They have no alternative to capitalism and respect all the so-called rights that the bosses and the owners of capital have within the system, including the right to own the factory and the right to move it wherever the cheapest Labor power can be found. It is these rights we have to take away from them.

In these times of economic crisis and increased globalization, US capitalism is faced like never before with competition from all corners of the globe. In these conditions, the Union leaders cannot even pretend to fight; there is little room for maneuver and they become even more exposed as agents of the employers in the workers’ movement; as champions of the market. They have gone from passive supporters of the employers to open collaborators.

The Labor bureaucracy organizes to crush any forces that dare to reject their view that, to use Thatcher’s phrase---There Is No Alternative (TINA) and who instead insist that -- There Is An Alternative. (TIAA). And indeed there is. The auto industry, despite the reduction in numbers and weakening of the UAW, still has a significant influence in the US economy, millions of jobs are dependent on it. The industry still has 575,000 workers with most of them unionized; 108,000 are employed in the foreign owned plants. This is a potentially powerful force that could use its influence to tap in to the anger throughout US society at the losing of jobs, housing, public services and the imposition of massive wage and benefit cuts. Stopping US auto production and reaching out to all workers and our communities would transform the balance of class forces in the US; though the employers and their Democratic Party friends wouldn’t like it.

The alternative to the UAW leadership’s cooperation is to reject openly the view that we have to compete and there is no alternative to the market. The big business politicians nationalized GM for a brief period but left the auto bosses in charge. The production of society’s transport must be taken out of private hands. We must demand what we need and reject the idea society can’t afford it; Afghanistan alone is costing US taxpayers $7 billion a month.

A response to global capitalism is global Unions and we can’t build global Unions if we are all competing with each other across borders in order to help our own individual or national employers make more profit than the other guy, or better still, drive them from the marketplace altogether.

Given the present state of affairs in the leadership of organized Labor, unless we act, we will be in a much weaker position when circumstances are such that we cannot go back any further and we are forced to fight. To read other pieces we have written on the UAW and what we consider to be an alternative approach that rank and file oppositions can offer to the collaborative policies of the leadership check out the following links.
We can’t defeat the capitalist offensive without changing our unions
Chrysler, Industry, Freedom and Socialism
Auto bosses come back for more: promise more layoffs/plant closures
A short comment on the Chrysler situation
Now The Auto Bosses Want To Feed At The Public Trough
Revolt in Kokomo/Interview With An Autoworker
What Works and What Doesn't In Building A New Workers’ Movement