Bob King and UAW leadership undermine R&F Union power at the Big Three

Left: Where the concession strategy has led us.  The struggle for a 6 hour workday with no loss in pay is an important part to job creation.

I was reading some of the details of the contract negotiations between the UAW and the Big Three US auto companies in Gregg Shotwell’s reports on the SOS website. There is nothing new as Gregg points out, simply further concessions and undermining of the collective interests of workers on the job.  UAW president, Bob King, like the entire leadership at the helm of the AFL-CIO, is nothing more than a Labor broker.  His job, he believes, is to provide the investors that own the auto industry with Labor power at the most competitive price. Along with this, the workplace itself, the actual process of production which is the source of profit, must be free from any rules or regulations that undercut this profit taking otherwise the owners of capital will take it elsewhere, China perhaps, or Vietnam. This is why it is crucial we link with workers in these countries and help them raise their wages and conditions rather than compete against them by advancing protectionist policies.

Globalization and their complete capitulation to the almost "divine right" of the market have brought the heads of organized Labor this far.  They do not even pretend anymore as the objective situation and the obstacle of their own consciousness forces them to assist the employers in driving US workers’ wages and condition down further.  If we read the public statements of both the auto bosses and Union officials like King we can see the unity that bonds them.

Speaking about the contract at the Lake Orion plant in Michigan GM Vice Chairman Stephen J Girsky announces, “I’ve got to have a very competitive and unique labor deal at the Lake Orion plant.”

(Business Week, 9-19-2011)

No worries, UAW president King is on the same page, “We are going to make sure the companies are competitive coming out of these agreements.” He told the bosses at the Detroit Economic Club last month. (Check the UAW label for more on this subject).

This formidable combination of the employers and the heads of organized Labor has been very successful in doing just that. Business Week gives an example of one auto-worker that started in 2008 at the GM sport-utility plant in Lansing. His started at $14 an hour and earns less than $16 two years later. This worker’s grandparents worked all their lives for GM and his mother is a GM lifer still working at a plant across town where she makes twice his pay for the same work. These divisive and solidarity busting conditions have come about with the willing help of the UAW leadership at the entire leadership of the AFL-CIO, the national Union body to which the UAW is affiliated.

The Union hierarchy has capitulated completely to the bosses’ agenda.  “The idea of having middle to upper-middle-class wages in manufacturing has been over for a long time” says Diane Swonk an economist in the financial industry.  The Union officials hope against hope that if they help their bosses compete against their rivals for market share and win the rapacious race for profits they’ll return to more normal times and things will get better.  Ms. Swonk makes very clear the intentions of the bosses; they are serious about this. No matter what they think personally, and I am sure individually they may feel bad that for a family of six the starting wage at GM assembly plants is at the federal poverty level, the bosses are driven by the laws of the system to do take this path.  They have to compete with their rivals in China and other countries where wages are much lower and conditions more favorable to wage exploitation. If we as workers accept these same laws, that the production of society’s means of transportation must be privately owned and that our own individual employers’ interests and ours are the same and we have to help them compete with their rivals in this struggle for profits pitting us against other workers who are doing the same, then we cannot win; we must accept “their reality” as the Labor officials do and suffer the consequences. 

It is not the individual bonuses or wages or lifestyles of the bosses or the Union officials that is the root of the problem, these are secondary details, it is the laws of the system itself; it is a natural process in a capitalist system of production and it is where we have to direct our thoughts and actions if we want to stop it.

It’s somewhat laughable that big business politicians and corporate heads talk of the “powerful” Union movement.  But for the last half-century, excepting a rise in militancy in the eighties and early nineties with strikes defeated primarily due to the failure of the top leadership to fight, the Union leadership has pretty much given the bosses’ everything they want.  Every now and then we get an upsurge like we have recently with 100,000 on the streets of Madison Wisconsin and the Verizon strike that has disappeared from the news and look at what they did there?   We have retreated to the point where we have 100,000 workers on the streets demanding the right to representation that we won years ago and are striking to get the bosses to talk to us at all.

It is important to defend the right to bargain, but it is also important what we are bargaining for.  Instead, the 100,000 in Wisconsin were sent home and directed in to an electoral campaign to elect Democrats in to office.  The moment was ripe for the running of independent candidates based on a program that spoke to people’s needs and that could have been the basis for building a national mass party of working people. Instead, it will leave many people demoralized further, especially the youth who entered political life for the first time.  It will only be temporary though as further battles lie ahead and lessons will have been learned.

There’s some explosions ahead, of this there is no doubt in my mind.  What this means with regard to organized Labor is that we have to build workplace committees that reject the bosses reality and demand what we and all workers need to live a decent and productive life and develops a fighting direct action strategy for winning. Based on these committees we can build opposition caucuses in our local Unions that do not limit themselves to immediate economic interests but reach out to our communities, the youth, and other sections of our class as part of building a generalized movement to drive the bosses offensive back and initiate an offensive of our own.  In this way we can openly challenge the collaborative strategy of the present leadership and replace them.

We have no alternative but to fight.