Ford workers had better look out, their leaders are talking to the boss.

Former UAW head Gettelfinger and Bill Ford in 2007

 Right: Two minds that think alike

Ford Motor Corp opened negotiations with the UAW last week but I didn’t see anything about it in today’s Wall Street Journal. There’s not much to write about really as the auto bosses aren’t too worried. The UAW leadership has bent over backwards in order to help them in their struggle to win market share form their rivals.

The US taxpayer bailed out Ford’s competitors, GM and Chrysler to the tune of billions of dollars. Under the government supported bankruptcies, workers at GM and Chrysler, under pressure from their leadership agreed to a ban on all strikes as well as binding arbitration. But workers at Ford rejected their leadership’s recommendation and voted by more than a 70% majority to against a deal that included these two major concessions. Ford workers have given up $7000 to $30,000 in concessions since 2005 and with Ford earning $14.2 billion since 2008 and almost $5 billion this year so far, Ford workers want those concessions back.

UAW President Bob King is blowing hot air about the $56 million in stock that Ford CEO Alan Mulally got back in March after a 48% rise in compensation for 2010 to $26.5 million. But this is an act, the corporate CEO's don't fear the heads of organized Labor.

The bosses are not worried about what the heads of the UAW say in public  because they say different things in private and in practice have been very helpful; they have proved their loyalty to the point of collaboration with employers to fire local leaders that resist concessions like the UAW members at the Freightliner plant in Cleveland NC for example.  Like the entire leadership of organized Labor, the UAW leadership accepts completely the laws of the market and that workers with one employer have to compete with workers of another employer in order that their particular boss can win market share from their rivals or, even better, drive them from the market place altogether. They support this between individual domestic employers and between workers internationally.

Thinking the solution is that we all “buy American” is a tragic mistake, no matter how well intentioned. The call for protectionist measures is basically the same thing; protect our bosses. It is impossible to build the workers’ solidarity, domestic or international, that is necessary to drive back the capitalist offensive in this way.

So technically Ford are in a stronger position than their brothers and sisters at GM and Chrysler but this combination of the bosses and the top Union officials is the force that has to be reckoned with. But it not the only force; the main problem is our own consciousness.

The policies of concession and betrayal by the present leadership stems from their world view the acceptance of the market and that workers must compete. The Team Concept is the expression for this. As I have written before, any opposition or group that offers itself as an alternative to the present leadership will be no different if it accepts this world-view. The bosses’ side of the team is already calling in the chips at Ford, “We cannot continue to have a cost gap with the competition and still be able to make significant US investment and create new jobs…..we’ll need to focus on closing the gap” Ford says on its website fordahead.com that announces publicly its bargaining position.

"It's going to be a balancing act this year," said analyst Michelle Krebs. "The UAW very much knows that they have to be a partner to the auto companies."

There will be no public outcry, no press conference and public statement from the UAW leadership or the rest of the top dogs at the head of organized Labor in response to this statement. There will be no response because they agree with it. They agree that they have to be “partners” with the auto bosses. And partners in what? On the golf course? We know they do that but that’s not what they mean. They mean partners in the business of making profit and in order to make that partnership work Ford is obliged to bring wages and benefits down in line with GM and Chrysler and GM and Chrysler down with domestic non Union plants and all plants down to the plants in Mexico and the plants in Mexico down to those in China and those in China down to those in Vietnam----you get my drift.

The goal should be to unite workers internationally to bring all wages, benefits and conditions up and we can’t do that if we believe in our own minds that we are on the same team as the bosses, that employers and workers have the same economic interests.  (This doesn’t mean we would have the same approach to a small business like a barber shop or corner store for example as we would to the giant multinationals.)

The US auto industry should have been taken in to public ownership as opposed to handing over billions of dollars to the same folks that are wrecking the economy and using their crisis as an excuse to drive workers back to conditions that existed before the rise of the Industrial Unions in the 1930’s. This is a positive step even in a capitalist economy but ultimately the only permanent solution is the transportation industry, which is what the auto industry is part of, to be publicly owned under workers’ control and management and what is produced and how it is produced determined in a planned, rational way based on what is best for society rather than what is best for Alan Mulally and the few thousand other unelected people who run society.