GM Strike. UAW Leadership's Strategy Another Lost Opportunity for Organized Labor

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

When I sit down to write an article, picking a title is usually the hardest part of the process. But watching some news last night about the UAW/GM strike after UAW negotiators sent out an email to members on Sunday that the talks were going very badly, convinced me that my title, GM Strike: The Auto Workers Are Up Against Global Capitalism was the right choice. Please have a read.

As I stated previously, it appeared from reports in the media last Friday, based on a letter Terry Dittes, the UAW’s top negotiator sent to the members, that a tentative agreement was in the works as they had found “common ground” on health care. On Saturday, the mood was positive and the UAW leadership presented GM with a proposal they thought would bring results.

Oh my! The GM bosses responded with a swift kick in the testicles returning with a proposal that had already been rejected according to reports. Remember, the present UAW leadership, aside from some top officers being investigated for corruption, by the masters of corruption, is the same leadership whose disastrous organizing strategies have failed to organize the VW plant in Chattanooga TN and have cooperated with the auto bosses in savaging the wages, benefits and working conditions of the unionized auto workers. They have been so cooperative, the Auto bosses are close to the point where they don’t need them at all.

So Dittes sends a letter out Sunday (yesterday) to his members who have been on strike for three weeks that things had deteriorated and blamed GM for the lack of progress. GM were refusing to “provide enough job security in the next four year contract” Dittes wrote.

Meanwhile, in a separate letter to the GM management on the same day, Dittes writes,  “During your response to our proposal delivered at 9:05 am today, Sunday, October 6, 2019, you didn’t even have a professional courtesy to explain why you could not accept or why you rejected our package proposal for each item we addressed. We expect the Company to respond and discuss the package proposal we presented yesterday. The law and basic decency require no less.” Original on the UAW website.

This is the current state of the top leadership of not only the UAW but the organized working class in the US today; “professional courtesy”?   “The law and basic decency require no less”?  It’s like a Monty Python sketch. Neither the law nor professional courtesy carry any weight when profits are concerned.

Weakness Breeds Aggression in a Class War

The utter bankruptcy of the UAW leadership is bad enough but the price the UAW members in auto pay for this class collaboration is dire, and we should not forget that GM janitors represented by the UAW are also on strike.  Beyond that, all workers will pay for this treachery. I asked some Trump loving former co-worker the other day what was it about Trump that he thought was good for him. He had no real answer other than to say with regard to our workplace that Trump hasn’t hurt us. This backward, individualistic thinking has penetrated our consciousness to a great degree.

For years I warned my brothers and sisters that defeats for the auto-workers and the UAW, once a benchmark for entry in to the US middle class for working people, will mean an increased assault on the public sector. The public sector is the last bastion of unionism in the US with some 34% of us unionized compared to around 7% for the private sector----about 12% total. The auto workers struggle against the bosses and their partnership with our own leaders is a struggle all workers must see as our own. The public sector is being savaged with the same cooperation from the heads of organized labor. The teachers/educators gains were made in states where the labor hierarchy is weaker.  It was by-passing the established leadership and ignoring and abandoning their failed policies that brought victories. This has had a very positive affect on the labor movement and the working class as a whole.

That a sticking point is the demand from the UAW negotiators for job security reveals this bankrupt leadership’s thinking. As I wrote previously,

“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 biggest problem with top officials like Dittes is that they are trapped by their own consciousness; the “stop in the mind” as the British historian Christopher Hill called it. They agree with the bosses when it comes to how the world must work. They worship the market and see no alternative to capitalism; they hope they’ll keep their perks, make it to retirement and the devil take the hindmost. The reader must be aware that folks like Dittes read the important capitalist journals. GM bosses like CEO Mary Barra meant it when she told assured investors, “We are willing to make tough and strategic decisions to not only meet our commitments but to secure the company’s future,”.

One of the workers I saw on the picket line, after hearing of GM’s hard line said, "It made us feel that we're not appreciated for the work that we do." It’s hard to imagine anyone can think that about the corporate bosses given the savaging the US working class has taken over the past 40 years. But it is the conscious class collaboration that the UAW leadership practice that has helped to drive back the class consciousness of the US worker.

For years now, the auto bosses and the UAW leadership have cooperated in convincing workers that there is no alternative to concessions; that we can’t win. There is no real objective ideological or organizational challenge to this argument that comes at us from the pulpit, the universities which are capitalist think tanks, the trade union leadership and the mass capitalist media. They are right of course; we cannot win if we accept that profit is sacrosanct, capitalism permanent and that workers cannot manage the economy, cannot decide what’s best for all of us, cannot govern society.

A lesson we must draw from the teachers strikes that took place in right to work states led by right wing Republicans is that this is not true (this is not an endorsement for the Democrats as we have suffered under both administrations). The teachers/educators movement undermined that argument and it’s a dangerous precedent for the present pro-market trade union hierarchy and the self styled socialist organizations with many members in the trade union movement who refuse to challenge the leadership on whom they depend for recognition or jobs. Here is a short video of a contribution I made at a DSA meeting during the Oakland CA teachers strike. I made a leading figure in the DSA figure in the union work (a UAW member at the university I believe) quite angry with this contribution and despite 30 years of union activity on the shop floor I am persona non grata when it comes to DSA and union work.

To stay afloat with the present approach of the UAW leadership, workers in the US will have to take a lot more hits to compete with workers in Cambodia, China, Mexico and so on.  This is why international solidarity is so crucial. Here’s a list of GM’s plants. Capitalism has no problem with borders. It likes to cross them whenever it is profitable to do so. The Wall Street Journal once referred to it as Full Spectrum Dominance.

I need to cut this short but as workers and rank and file union members we have to recognize that despite the decline in union membership and strikes, with the exception of the education strikes last year, the organized working class has tremendous potential power in the US.

And despite the mistake in striking only one auto manufacturer, the GM strike has shut down production at more than 30 plants in the US. Suppliers and dealerships have been affected leading to thousands of layoffs of non UAW members and non factory workers. Also, dealers are now facing a difficulty getting parts and supplies that will affect consumers-----other workers in other words. GM is welcoming this though it’s losing $50 to $100 million a day and almost $1 billion so far. On the one hand, the investment is worth it for GM as it has to stay competitive in a global marketplace and is thinking long term, and on the other, millions of other workers, many not fortunate enough to have a union, benefits, healthcare let alone a pension, will suffer and GM hopes this will undermine any support the UAW members have in the wider public.

This is why it is not enough to say this strike is defending the future for all workers because as it is run it is not. In any strike or labor dispute we have to have demands that draw other sectors of the working class in to struggle and unionized workers have to overcome the not unrealistic view that we only talk about solidarity when it’s our immediate workplaces and needs. Every strike has to be generalized. In this case there has to be a union counter, a reason for other workers being negatively affected by the strike to support it. In West Virginia, striking educators not only own a 5% raise for themselves (up from a 1% offer) they won 5% for every other state worker. What better reason to join or support striking workers than that.

It’s very disappointing, “Everybody is ready to go back to work” a Detroit assembly plant picketer says on TV yesterday. I sympathize; I know what being on strike for a month does to a family. This is the US, you have no money you die.

The rank and file member has to recognize that we are fighting a system; we are fighting global capitalism and in that battle workers internationally are our allies. We cannot rely on any forces except the potential power of working class people to shut the economy down and as part of the movement build a political party of our own. The trade union hierarchy will not act even on small reforms without pressure from below. 

But the millions of dues paying members have to step to the plate. Opposition caucuses have to be built, that reject the false argument about concessions, that reject the so-called law of the market and build a movement from below that can dislodge the present leadership. Any group that tries to overcome this problem within the framework of capitalism will fail. Transportation, which is what auto manufacturing is, must be a public project and production shifted from autos, whether gas or electric to mass transit. See my earlier commentary.

We have seen many struggles against the same forces that are attacking the GM workers now. Standing Rock, the movements against racism and the climate strikes. I saw a former UAW president Frank Hammer speaking last week and he raised the need for the GM strike and the climate strike to come together. When other workers are being beaten down, when racism and poverty are destroying entire communities and when women are screaming for help against sexual abuse on the job and off, organized labor has to be in the forefront of those struggles building allies and standing up for all the oppressed. I realize that many UAW members supported the sexual predator and racist Donald Trump. I hope lessons have been learned here.

To be silent on all these other issues, when immigrant children fleeing persecution and poverty are being thrown in concentration camps in the US is not acceptable. We win allies by fighting for and with them.

I have heard that there are some rumblings within the leadership of the UAW. This would be a positive development and it is inevitable that pressure from the ranks if significant enough, would cause some splits at the top. But in the last analysis, it is up to the rank and file of the labor movement to step to the plate and reverse course.