Day Seven of the UAW/GM Strike. Spread it.

Workers picket the GM Arlington plant. Source

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
Member DSA

UAW leaders are very upset with GM. “They’re not negotiating in good faith” said UAW Vice President Terry Dittes last week. Dittes is also the chief bargainer with GM. Only a labor official completely disconnected from reality could make such a statement. In the struggle between capital and labor over the wealth workers create there is no such thing as good faith.

Last Sunday, the day before the strike, “GM took an unprecedented step……. making public what it had offered at the bargaining table” the Wall Street Journal reported.  This should have been a sign of the real intentions of the GM management. By doing this, the auto bosses are using the media to negotiate directly with the American public, in particular the millions of unorganized workers, the poor, disenfranchised and others struggling with debt, housing, and of course health care. The 86% or so of the US working class that is outside of organized labor. The object is to portray GM’s workforce as greedy and selfish and to undermine sympathy and support for the strikers.

The capitalist mass media has wasted no time in pointing out that out-of-pocket health costs for GM’s UAW workers are around 3%, compared with 29% for workers on average according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study. This is a staggering difference and that’s why we are told about it. The proposal GM made public, “…..also included $7 billion in investments and 5,400 jobs. It listed investments in eight facilities in four states, additional new vehicle and propulsion programs, an improved profit-sharing formula, ratification payment of $8,000, and retention of health care benefits including new coverage for autism therapy care, chiropractic care and allergy testing.”  Detroit Free Press

That will seem like heaven to millions of workers in the U.S. And the general approach by GM management will be to convince them that GM’s workers should quit their whining. All’s fair in love and war as the saying goes.

Some of the Issues

One area in contention is temporary workers and the tier system. Some workers are temporary for years and about 7 to 10% of GM’s workforce is temporary at one time or another.  Temps are paid $15 an hour and have reduced or no benefits and can’t transfer if their plant shuts down. This situation is the result of years of concessions and labor management cooperation on the part of the UAW leadership and now the UAW negotiating team is demanding that GM offer these workers-------who most likely never got to vote on the tier-------  a “path” to becoming permanent.  We all know what that means. The company will offer a nice 8-year journey to the top tier after making hundreds of millions of dollars off the backs of workers earning less than their co-workers doing the same or similar work.

The trade union hierarchy nationally not just the UAW leadership, has allowed this to happen through not organizing a real fightback against it.  The same happened in other industries including retail. It has been a chosen method for the labor hierarchy to settle weak and concessionary contracts as the future worker/union member is not there to vote on a contract that will throw them to the wolves. Consequently, as they work alongside co-workers earning lower wages and with fewer benefits, they often blame “the union”. It causes animosity and division weakening the union and the working class further.

Despite union officials like top UAW GM bargainer, Dittes accusing GM bosses of not being decent fellows, they expect a class conscious worker to believe that any “path” to permanency and equal pay for equal work that GM bosses will chart will be anything but a “Long and Winding Road” indeed.

End the Tier System

Make all temporary workers permanent at the top tier.

GM should pay back wages temporary workers were denied by the tier system.

Profit Sharing

Many GM workers are upset that the company, after making some $35 billion in profits over the past three years while paying its CEO Mary Barra $22 million, is closing plants and not sharing more of those profits with the workers that produce them: “It’s just not fair”, one auto worker said. But capitalism is a system of exploitation and no economic system in which the wealth of a small minority is accumulated from the labor of the majority can be “fair”.  The capitalist is under no obligation to “share” profits with the worker. From the perspective of the owners of capital, profits is their just reward for investing in a particular industry. If we as workers don’t grasp that we can never arrive at a winning solution.

We have limited knowledge of the actual books and financial goings on of private companies and the call to open the books should be a demand any time bosses call for cuts. But according to reports, General Motors said Wednesday its UAW-represented workers will get profit-sharing checks of $10,750 this year down from last year's $11,750. That this happens at all is proof of the importance of organizing in to unions. But again, this option is not open to temps.

Job Security.
Once again, there is no such thing as job security in the so-called free market system. Capitalism doesn’t work like that. If we take the two plants that were initially scheduled for closure, the Lordstown plant and the Detroit Hamtramick plant, they have been, as the WSJ reported, “….sputtering along at less than half their capacity, building cars that a dwindling number of people want to buy.” (WSJ, 9-19-2019).  Unused capacity is not conducive to investment and no capitalist party or government will argue otherwise.

The immediate demand in response to this problem must be a shorter workweek to create jobs. The productive power of labor is so great that we could easily be working three-day weeks. Instead, not controlling the labor process or owning new technology, increased productivity eventually leads to excess workers being caste off like waste.

I recall a court case some years ago when the UAW leadership used the courts to try and block a GM plant from closing in Ypsilanti MI and moving to Arlington Texas. The courts weren’t receptive, you can’t tell capitalists where to put their capital in a bourgeois democratic system.  Naturally, the investors applied a little economic terrorism forcing the communities to compete with each other for which community would offer the most favorable tax breaks and other deals. Arlington won I recall. .

That’s what freedom means to the ruling class in the US; the right for capital to go where it wants when it wants and in what form. Full Spectrum Dominance is the term once used.

UAW leadership’s Strike Strategy
Despite the accusations of bad faith from top UAW officials, and reports of how elated Wall Street investors were over the proposed GM closures, many of them likely investors in the auto industry, the UAW leadership decided to only strike GM rather than extend it to the other two producers. The contracts for Ford and Chrysler/Fiat were extended and, just to show how “fair” the UAW leadership is, they are continuing with the “jointness” programs at these two auto manufacturers.

These “jointness” programs flow from the Team Concept, the view that workers and bosses have the same economic interests and as workers, our future is dependent on helping our individual employers drive their competitors from the marketplace. This is a disaster as we are forced to competition with each other nationally and internationally for who can best help their employers win that game. The declining living standards of US workers is a result of this management philosophy. Solidarity cannot be built that way and it leads to a race to the bottom. Our goal is not to compete with workers in Mexico (or build walls to isolate ourselves from them), but to join with them in improving their living conditions, and ours.  

I’ve heard striking workers in the media say that a victory for them is a victory for all workers. We are, “…..striking on behalf of neglected workers across America.”, one striker was quoted as saying. While this is true to a degree, and it is crucial to support all workers on strike including this one, words are not enough to convince the 86% of the working class not in unions or the poor, the marginalized, other sections of the working class brutalized by the so-called free market, that this is the case.  It will also not be enough to combat the propaganda in the mass media that unions only care about their own members and their members’ futures in these disputes.  This has to be made concrete.

A Time For Optimism
When I watched the announcement of the strike from the UAW leadership last Sunday, it was as if nothing has changed over the past few years. It was so uninspiring; they appeared totally demoralized and it’s clear they have no real strategy for the changed situation. They mentioned demands but there was none that would have given real inspiration to the millions of unorganized workers struggling to make ends meet and brought them closer to organized labor. We are in a new era and for organized labor, the teachers and educators’ battles have changed the game.

So far, 329,300 workers have been on strike this year through August. This is slightly lower than last year’s tally of 451,300 in the same period according to the Labor Department. Last years figure was driven by the stoppages in education. If we don’t think there is a shift in the class struggle we might consider that in 2009 there were just 12,500 workers for the entire year. Then there all the other often independent and at times isolated struggles taking place around health care, the environment, racism, sexism, education and student debt and so on.

“Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.” George Schultz

Not only should the UAW strike Ford and Chrysler/Fiat, but serious efforts to build links throughout the labor movement and wider society should be paramount.  Not only should the UAW leadership reach out to the teachers/educators movement, but just down the road from the UAW headquarters working class people in Flint Michigan have been forced to drink poisoned water. There is a crisis in numerous urban centers over poisoned water; organized labor must not be silent on these issues.The movement for climate change which is so important to our youth should be approached as well. GM at one point also supported socialized medicine as it would take the responsibility for medical care off the company's back. The potential for building a generalized offensive of the US working class against the brutality of the market is better than it has been for decades. But it is this that terrifies the strategists atop organized labor.

In our negotiations in 1997 we had a solidarity committee to which we invited rank and file workers to join. We leafleted other workplaces, public and private, the DMV and the welfare and unemployment departments in order to bring the unemployed in to the struggle as we were demanding more union jobs. This was a correct strategy; it was only our lack of resources and the failure of the leadership of the wider labor movement to adopt such a strategy in all disputes., that prevented greater success with it.

I have been keeping in contact with some teachers, parents and community activists in Kentucky that have been fighting the right wing state government led by a manufacturer and hedge fund Republican governor. It is a Right to Work State but that didn’t stop the teachers/educators movement. There are two Ford auto plants in the Louisville area that employ 12,500 workers and each auto manufacturing job translates to seven additional jobs in the community according to the nonpartisan Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  And with 95,000 employees, Kentucky is third in auto industry-related employment as a percent of total state employment.  This is real potential power if we use it.

The Louisville Central Labor Council has 53,000 workers affiliated to it including SEIU, Teamsters and Afscme. However, instead of building on the militancy shown by Louisville and Jefferson County folks in the education battles, officials from these three unions, along with the head of the Jefferson County Teachers Association (NEA) held a press conference and publicly attacked the more militant teachers and parents in Jefferson County that closed the schools early this year. The Teamster leader accused them of “pimping out” his members. This was a disgusting example of class betrayal on the part of these union officials. The union officials also refused to oppose a gang ordinance that the legislature passed and that would have gone a long way to strengthening the relationship between labor and the black community as well as eastern and western Kentucky.

So in Kentucky at the moment we have a situation where non-union miners are blocking railroad tracks due to being denied money owed them by the coal company. We saw the massive education struggles and the crisis in 2018-19. Both urban and rural Kentucky are in crisis and the heads of organized labor in Kentucky have not to my knowledge made any effort to take a great opportunity like this and bring these forces all struggling against the same enemy together. These are the actions of a bankrupt leadership. One doesn’t need a Phd in sociology or political science from a fancy university to know that connecting people in struggle in this way is the way to win. We have stressed that organized labor’s present leadership will not do this without a mass movement from below but in their absence, the Democratic Socialists of America and the leadership of Labor Notes that are working together on union strategies have the resources to start down that road.

GM Janitors UAW members on strike this week.

The GM strike, now in its seventh day, has begun to affect the supply chain. Some 4,500 members of Unifor, the Canadian union that represents auto-workers have been furloughed and, as the strike continues there will be more layoffs to come. By not striking the three auto manufacturers, the UAW leadership, motivated by a fear of the potential power of their own members and where it may lead, are letting the bosses off the hook. I should add as an aside that 850 Aramark janitors at GM, also UAW members, have walked off the job and they have been bargaining all week.  There is activity everywhere.

I have tried to make a few points here as this dispute takes place. And while a victory, any small victory for GM workers is a positive development for the working class as a whole. It will only be temporary and can soon turn in to its opposite. We are on the brink of a recession or slump and from the bosses’ point of view GM management is preparing for that likelihood in the way they always do, making the working class pay for it.

It’s clear with the invitation to Elizabeth Warren to speak today in Detroit that the UAW officials are hoping that the Predator in Chief will lose the next election and the Democrats will help them out.  This is a strategy that has failed time and time again as I have stated many times before. An important factor in the rise of Trump has been the trade union hierarchy’s refusal to offer the working people of the US an alternative to the two capitalist parties in the form of an independent working class alternative. In an era where the decades old domination of US political life by the two parties of Wall Street is coming to an end, union leaders urge workers to vote for a party they abandoned decades ago. One hundred million refused to participate in the 2016 election and they’re not all Nazi’s, nor are all Trump voters.

I think Unifor has called for the nationalization of the auto industry and regardless of what happens in this particular dispute, this road must be taken if we are to embark on a journey that will transform society and how we manage it. Taking what amounts to society’s transportation system in to public ownership and producing for social need rather than profits will allow us to build mass transit. The electric self-driving cars are not the answer. Climate change and the destruction of life on earth as we know it will not be halted by the electric car.  Profits, not the transportation of human beings are paramount as things stand. 

In the last analysis, only the ownership, management and control of the auto industry and other important sections of the economy by workers as consumers and producers is the solution to this never ending cycle of back and forth, up and down madness of the market. 

Note: I left a lot out here but I wanted to share some of my thoughts about this potentially game changing strike and what could be done.