Strong Demands From UAW Leadership. But How to Win Them is Key

UAW Demands: Screenshot From Katie Halper Show See video below

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

08-11-23

 

In the screen shot above taken from the Katie Halper show (video below) are some of the major proposals Shawn Fain and the reform slate that dislodged the old guard in the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) are taking to the table in negotiations. The present contract covering the big three auto manufacturers,  General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, formerly Chrysler, expires on Sept 14^th and talks with Stellantis have already begun.

 

Any hint at curbs or restrictions on capital, its profits or power in the workplace, is usually met with accusations of class war from the mass media that they control and, in the video below, we can see the crazed response from the well known champion of the free market, commentator, former hedge fund manager and CNBC anchor Jim Cramer.

 

As a retired public sector worker, I already have three of the above proposals, a defined benefit pension, retiree medical benefits and a Cost of Living Adjustment or COLA. All are very important in a country like the US with a dismal privatized health care system based on the market. A defined benefit plan is one in, “…. which an employer/sponsor promises a specified pension payment, lump-sum, or combination thereof on retirement that depends on an employee's earnings history, tenure of service and age, rather than depending directly on individual investment returns.” 

 

 Like all things in the so-called free market, nothing is permanent and as the market fluctuates, promises made can easily be taken away and the only force that can prevent that is the organized working class.

 

As far as COLA goes, myself and other leaders in our local always made the point that COLA is not a raise, it is basically staying even with inflation and that is based on statistics developed through capitalist institutions by free market strategists.

 

While Jim Cramer is considered a bit of a crazed character, his concerns in this video below are held by the capitalist class as a whole. The fear of whipping up antagonism toward big business and the profits that flow in to the coffers of the wealthy, (and Fain refers to the massive profits of the auto companies on the UAW’s Facebook page and in the clip in the video) leads most commentators in the capitalist mass media to take a more insidious approach.  Workers will lose jobs, we can’t afford it, the economy will collapse, we will lose our freedoms, it’s against our national interest and we will be invaded by (name any country) and so on.

In true McCarthyite fashion, Cramer accuses Fain of being a “Marxist” and that, “Fain studied Trotsky, pre icepick era”. He adds that, “If Shawn Fain gets his way, you can short every single auto company till the cows come home.”

 

Not too many workers are worried about short selling, but noticeably absent from the UAW proposals that are directed at the members as well as the bosses, is the leadership’s intention to dump the Team Concept. This class collaborationist ideology argues that workers and bosses have the same economic interests has been a disaster. In my history it has been called quality of life circles, interest based bargaining, labor management teams, and more. Brother Fain does not make an issue of it at all to my knowledge. Yet there can be no serious gains without rejecting the Team Concept

 

We cannot build solidarity and organize a general offensive against the bosses and be on the same team as them at the same time. It pits workers in one company against workers in another, workers in one country, one region, against workers elsewhere.

 

This is why union officials are rarely specific when referring to wages or their expectations as a whole and instead talk of a “fair” contract or a “fair” wage rise. The goal is to get the bosses to share more of their profits with workers. Brother Fain refers to this as “shared prosperity” and there is no such thing. The most blatant example of that view of the world is profit sharing language in contracts.

 

Start High

I remember my first negotiations in 1982 when an old timer told me that our demands should be sky high and through the talks we reach a “fair” compromise. This is most likely what Fain is doing and that privately, his hope is he’ll get something. He has to take back something.

 

However, the demands the UAW president is taking to the table are significant in the sense that they are not concessions. A shorter workweek, (most auto workers work 50 or 60 hours a week says Fain) a 40% wage increase (after decades of concessions) along with the defined benefit plan, medical benefits and the end of tiers.  Another proposal is that workers at the new EV plants should receive the same pay as other GM workers. Another important issue is that Brother Fain stresses the damage the auto bosses have done to the communities and towns where workers live and points to the 65 plants they’ve closed. It’s an attempt to draw our communities in to the battle, or certainly should be.

 

This is not teamwork, it’s not a program for labor peace, as the auto bosses will oppose even these basic demands as anything but a path to “labor peace” which is the usual goal of the labor hierarchy at the expense of their own members’ wellbeing. The problem for Fain and co is that any serious effort to win the demands will be undermined by their own belief that workers and bosses, labor and capital, have the same economic interests. That, in the last analysis, they are part of the same team.

 

I wrote with regard to the Teamster/UPS contract that due to many factors, the UPS profits, the post COVID era, the increased activity within organized labor and among the low waged and unorganized, that there is an opportunity to make some minor gains. But there is no possibility in my mind that the demands Fain is raising are winnable without a strike and, most likely without a more generalized struggle not just UAW workers, but within organized labor, our communities and also the unorganized. Do not forget that leaders of the latter movement were not invited to the AFL-CIO convention last summer despite there being a session on organizing on the agenda. The non union plants in the US South have to also be taken in to account and workers there will be watching this closely.

 

“We have to be a lot more aggressive to negotiate better agreements, to set a standard that raises people up to a middle-class life.”, Brother Fain says using the bosses’ term middle class to describe workers which is predominant in the US.

While the role of leadership is crucial at the negotiating table as well as in general (I have been through three sets of negotiations), being aggressive, a vague term, is not enough. The media’s portrayal of union officials exiting motel rooms at three am, disheveled and tired, after making last minute deals, is standard Hollywood faire. In 1997 we had some tough, genuinely dedicated folks at the table. But at one point no more was forthcoming. We had a meeting of stewards from both the locals, a general meeting of a few hundred, from all classifications from both, often antagonistic unions, white collar and blue, and miraculously some $1 million in concessions from the employer fell on the table overnight. We couldn’t get that through four months of aggressive negotiating, and we were aggressive. Joint action, threat of a strike and unity won it.

 

The call for the taking in to public ownership of the auto, or transportation, industry has to be made and with it, the re-tooling of that industry for production of mass transit as opposed to military hardware and autos. Electric vehicles are not the answer either.

 

I do not make some of these criticism’s lightly, like all of us, I want the power of working people to enter the stage and give not just the auto bosses, but the US capitalist class reason to fear us. But I have drawn certain conclusions from my experiences, and I’ve walked miles of picket lines in my time.

 

Let’s not forget, only a few months ago Biden and the US Congress denied the railroad workers the right to strike by introducing strike breaking legislation overnight and forcing a contract on them they had already rejected.

 

  If need be, the two political parties of the employers will unite to do that in the case of the Teamsters, the UAW or any serious strike that actually hurts profits or undermines a company’s ability to compete with rivals both domestic or foreign.

 

If the new leadership in the UAW and the Teamsters are serious about changing course and stressing that they are different; they have to show this in their approach and their strategies for winning. The employers should be warned publicly that they will organize resistance to defy any anti-union laws that harm the material well being of working people.

 

Unions were built by violating the laws made by representatives of the capitalists and we can’t move forward without learning that lesson from history.