GM Strikers give the bosses a pounding! 49,000 hit the picket lines hard!
Photo: ABC News
While the Trump regime has its jackboot on the neck of the working class the GM workers are fed up and fighting back, standing up for themselves, temporary and second tier workers against the boss-friendly deal cut between GM, the UAW’s Gettlefinger, and the last Democratic President Obama. Obama’s gift to the ruling class was creating a two tier system paying the lower skill temps and new hires $15-$19 an hour while they did the same work as permanent legacy low skill line workers making $28-$33 per hour.
When the financiers, hedge funders and bankers of Wall Street put the U.S. financial markets into a tailspin in 2008-09 the auto industry had the wind taken out of its sails and needed to be revived by temporary nationalization. Not the type of state control that leads to socialism but the type of state ownership designed as a stopgap when the internal mechanisms of capitalism can not keep essential businesses from collapsing. We respond to the mismanagement leading to the collapse of industries with a program for the survival of the one productive class in society. Our transitional program demands nationalization of the entire auto industry under workers’ control without indemnification to the major stockholders! Then the industry can be retooled to build environmentally-friendly mass transport as part of a workers fight against climate catastrophe.
The deal that was cut in 2009 saved the big three, GM, Chrysler and Ford, not only at taxpayers expense (low interest loans-extended by the state and buoyed by quantitative easing) but by cutting the legs out from under the workers gains of the 1950’s-1970’s, forcing down wages, imposing two tiers that keep young workers in an ‘eternal’ servitude and poverty just at the time in their lives when they are trying to get out on their own and start families. This was the predictable outcome of decades of “pattern bargaining,” and today we are learning again the lesson Flint Michigan workers learned in the Douglas Fraser days of “the handshake”; with pattern bargaining you get shuttered plants. To beat the plutocrats you must strike them all!
And to ensure patriotic compliance and subservience to the foreign policy of offshoring production and super-exploiting workers abroad, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce led and the union tops joined in the chauvinist isolationist “Buy American” campaign. This was aimed in particular at China. Make China the boogey-man! Don’t look at the ownership class of the factories shuttered across the rust-belt, having been rationalized, financialised and outsourced by slick Yale and Harvard MBA hedge funders and bonds salesman. No, we are told to blame our shuttered factories on the Chinese and other authoritarian states that deliver up cheap labor to the imperialists’ Foreign Direct Investment and production equations for a slice of the pie.
We oppose the shuttering of factories. Moving the production of the wrong vehicles for a planet and species future overseas makes no more sense than building them in the U.S.A. But the Trumka leadership is trodding the same “patriotic” slope as Trump, leading from “trade war” to hot war. Our program demands jobs for all: if the capitalists refuse to retool after gleaning profits from loser car lines like the Olds and Plymouth, we call for sit-down strikes demanding 30 hours’ work for forty hours’ pay to spread the work so all may eat! To mobilize the power of the entire sector of auto workers the UAW should fight to organize all auto industry workers everywhere, including the south, Mexico and China too! The Trumkas howl ‘but China is COMMUNIST!,’ as if we are all oblivious suckers.
The Chinese working class suffers the consequences of the capitalist restoration. Slave-like factory conditions exist where workers are domiciled away from family and exploited for long hours, often cheated out of wages and overtime, and denied rights to democratic rank and file control of the unions that revolutionary Marxism has always fought for.
The Chinese Communist Party restored capitalism overturning the Deformed Workers State with a series of incremental take backs of the formally institutionalized material gains of the working class. Since the late 1970’s, social programs and ‘Iron Rice Bowl’ guarantees were eliminated bit by bit and all the while the Party was busy revising Marxism to institute a new “Market Socialism” or “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”
The social gains conquered in the revolution and its aftermath (1949-54) were violently crushed during Tiananmen when the army defended the capitalist road of the Party against an incipient political revolution emerging through an organized uprising of workers, students and intellectuals fighting for greater workers democracy. Once the opposition to restoration was crushed, the Party used state resources to finance and promote a layer of entrepreneurs, Joint Ventures with foreign Capitals and businesses spun out of the big State Owned Enterprise sector. These changes were codified in the 14th Party Congress in 1992.
In the U.S.A., the massive industrial unionized workforce, that in decades past, elevated vast layers of the working class through militant strike action, was able to gain a life style and expectation of what is peddled as the American Dream. The UAW’s historic militancy extracted from the Big Three wages that set standards other industrial workers measured their success by. They won enough income so a full time worker could expect health care, pensions, to be able to purchase a house, to send their kids to school and enjoy some family vacations and moderately inexpensive hobbies like boating, fishing, and golf.
This expectation served the ruling class’s ideological and propaganda Cold War against socialism and workers democracy. For decades the working class was erased from the American lexicon. The media, the academics, the Republicans, the Democrats and even the union leaders stopped referring to those who sell their labor power for their daily bread as workers and instead referred to them as members of a vast middle class. Of course, in America (2017) there are 12 million children among 40 million people living in a state of ‘food insecurity’ on the one side, while some 2,000 billionaires run the show at the other end, and even the 11 million millionaires think of themselves as “middle class.”
The concept of the working class had to be conflated into the middle class in order to gain buy-in to a system that never could provide for all. Class struggle and strike action is not the weapon used by the middle class to advance their conditions. No, perseverance, nose to the grindstone, bootlicking, house-flipping, and savvy me first business deals are the tools of the middle class. For the middle class there is no class solidarity, no need for unions, only a mythical belief that anyone can make it and if you are down in the gutter or in debt to the bankers it’s your own damn fault. This poisonous ideology infected the working class and the terminology, if it can be separated from the false consciousness in reality, is still being pushed by the likes of Bernie Sanders and most of our union leaders (who know better). Liberalism fortifies the fictions spawned in the witch hunts of the 1940’s-’50s that their imperialist program delivers increasing purchasing power. They set themselves up like postering “advance men” for Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” which promised the return of industrial jobs from overseas, but only cut taxes for capitalist plutocrats. Like Clinton before him, Trump points to the rise in low-wage service and temporary jobs and declares full employment.
Indeed it was not kosher to utter the words working class until Trump started using it to appeal to a layer of white workers who capitalism can never restore to financial security and who can be riled up against workers of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQI, religious and ethnic minorities who have been targeted as the cause of their declining standards of living, and the pulverising of the American Dream into a fentanyl nightmare. Never mind that the fentanyl pushers are ruling class families and friends of the billionaire class. Never mind that the house and job and communities you lost were taken by the hedge fund billionaires and their cronies.
But that mythology has been falling apart under the combined impact of the global crisis of capitalism where increased industrial productivity does not counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and requires the bosses to impose their decades long erosion of workers’ incomes in order to shore up the capitalists’ expectations of profitability.
The rust belt disintegration was not the fault of ‘overpaid’ union workers or of women entering the labor market, or of Black and Brown workers trying to sustain their families; rather the big corporations outsourced jobs from the industrial zones of the midwest and northeast to the non-union south and overseas to sweatshops around the globe, from Mexico and Honduras to Bangladesh and China, where union organizers can be disappeared and workers terrorized with impunity.
The crack in the ideological system of control started pre-Occupy, when millions of immigrants took to the streets on May Day 2009 and later when the Wisconsin state workers tried to launch their general strike against the union busting governor on the heels of the Greek workers strikes and the Arab-Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa. American workers may not be fully aware, but they were taking cues from the fightback of the international working class. They certainly were not getting any class struggle ideas from the Democrats or the union leaderships. Indeed, the union leaders did everything they could to defuse the situation in Wisconsin steering it into ineffectual electoral channels and off of the streets.
Although the teachers strike in Chicago (2012) won minimal gains, it fell short and 50 schools were shuttered after the strike was closed down by the combined mis-leadership of the ISO (Jeff Starkey) and the Democratic Party labor hacks his outfit buddied up to; however that strike reminded labor and capital alike what the power of mobilzed labor looks like. Twenty-five thousand Chicago teachers may strike again as early as October 7th because their past victories are under continuous attack by the bosses’ state, although with the same sort of Democrat leadership the teachers are not told the truth. The Longview Longshore strike in 2011, the Verizon strike in 2016, and even the non-union teachers who fought back in the Red-4-Ed strike wave showed that despite the power of the dominant ideology, the rank and file knows that strike action is the only way to win.
And now ten years after the NUMI GM/Toyota plant in Fremont, CA was closed with no more than a whimper from the UAW leadership and a toothless threat to boycott Toyota dealerships, the 49,000 GM workers couldn’t take it anymore and hit the bricks September 16th. No sooner did the GM workers walk out than the mere threat by 80,000 nurses in SEIU-UHW to strike resulted in a 4 year contract. With Tesla now in the old NUMI plant and labor on fire, Elon Musk must be shivering in his boots.
The UAW was built through militant class struggle, through sitdown strikes, and was one of the bastions of organized labor in America. Defending the union today requires revival of the militant tactics that built the unions. That means organizing workers defense guards and mass picket lines that no scab will dare cross. Seizing the plants through sit-down strikes and ringing them with mass picket lines of workers from other unions and the community would let GM know that the workers are serious. Extending the strike to the other Big Three auto companies, Ford and Chrysler, is needed as well as sympathy and solidarity strikes by workers in other sectors. The Teamsters have stated that they will honor picket lines. Hot-cargoing (refusing the handle struck goods) would go a long way towards solidarity. And to hell with strike-breaking injunctions! These can be turned into worthless pieces of paper through mass struggle and solidarity.
The UAW workers need to take the strike out of the hands of the pro-capitalist UAW bureaucrats through organizing democatic rank and file strike committees to elect the most militant and trusted workers to lead the strike. For a class struggle leadership of the strike! Strike leaders should be held fully accountable and immediately recallable through a democratic vote. A class struggle leadership will fight for COLA’s in all contracts and will establish a factual basis for determining the true inflation of living costs. The bosses’ cries of poverty (!) and blackmailing with threats to move plants overseas should never pressure the Union to lower wage demands! It was not the line workers who mismanaged auto production and made unwise international combinations. We demand a general across the board catch-up wage increase and abolition of the lower tier wage setup! Make all temporaries full-timers!
And crucially, uniting workers across national boundaries is needed, for joint class struggle against Capital. Five Mexican auto-workers were recently fired for organizing resistance to speedup instituted in Mexican plants as a result of the strike. We demand the immediate reinstatement of these workers with full back pay and benefits! No retaliation can be allowed to stand unsettled after the contract agreement! We note and celebrate “roughly 35 workers in Silao, who have been organizing to form an independent union, met to discuss how workers in Mexico could show solidarity with strikers in the United States, Córdova, one of the meeting’s organizers and a former GM worker, told Motherboard. The workers agreed they would not work overtime hours, which they said could derail the effects of the U.S. work stoppage…,” (“General Motors Fired Five Mexican Workers For Aiding the U.S. Auto Strike”, Motherboard).
Although the reawakening of the working class in the U.S.A. is slow and faces an uphill battle, both against the leadership of the unions and against naysayers in our own ranks, now is the time to advance the struggle to organize the unorganized, break with the Democrats and launch a fighting workers labor party that fights for a workers government on a transitional program.
END WAGE SLAVERY AND PRECARIOUS WORK!
Down with pattern-bargaining! Strike the whole industry! Organize the unorganized!
Build class struggle caucuses that use worker’s democracy to run the unions!
Jobs for all at living wages! Thirty hours work for forty hours pay!
Free quality health care for all! Free quality housing for all! Universal free quality education from day care to Graduate School and job retraining!
Guaranteed pension for all!
Trillions for public works to restore the environment & build carbon neutral energy sources!
Defund the military industrial complex and National Security State!
Smash Taft Hartley and all anti-union laws!
FOR UNION FEDERATIONS THAT USE SYMPATHY & GENERAL STRIKES TO WIN! FOR PICKET LINES THAT MEAN DO NOT CROSS!
FOR WORKERS SELF DEFENSE GUARDS AGAINST SCABS, FASCISTS AND RACIST VIOLENCE!
Break with the bosses’ political parties and candidates: Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Trump, Biden, Warren, Sanders …all of them! Build a fighting workers/labor party to fight for a workers government!
For a collectivized, centrally-planned socialist economy under workers control with production for social needs, not profit! Only world socialism can end exploitation, poverty, war, racism, and climate destruction!
