NUMMI/Toyota Workers and Friends:
Only YOU can save NUMMI workers’ jobs!
Organize NOW to occupy and take control of the plant!
Extended version of flyer distributed to UAW union members employed at NUMMI plant in Fremont, California, which is scheduled to be closed down in March 2010
Greetings to the workers of NUMMI from your supporters in Oakland, New York, Japan, Latin America, South Africa, and New Zealand! The news of your struggle to stop Toyota from closing the NUMMI factory has spread to your fellow workers far and wide, and they stand in firm solidarity with you in your battle to keep your plant open, save your jobs, and preserve your communities.
One thing is clear: You cannot achieve your goals by relying on politicians – Democrats or Republicans – to bail you out. Governor Schwarzenegger recently cut state workers’ salaries by 15%, and has slashed the budgets for schools, parks, and other services working people rely on. President Obama has managed to get Congress to spend billions of dollars to benefit Wall Street and the stockholders of the auto companies, and to fund the oil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But Obama will never deliver on health care reform, the Employee Free Choice Act (also known as EFCA or the card check law, which will make it easier for workers to organize unions), or any of the other changes he promised during his campaign. Anything the workers achieve will be through massive class struggles against Obama! Down with Obama and his Republicrat regime! The ugly truth is that our country is controlled by the rich and powerful, and operated in the interests of the big corporations they own. They are the only ones who will get bailed out by the government when they are in trouble. The rest of us have to rely on working class solidarity and militant class struggle actions.
As for Toyota, it has shown that despite its official corporate slogan of “mutual trust between labor and management,” it is no friend to its employees, even in Japan. In 2006, Japanese Toyota workers were so dissatisfied with the company’s treatment of the workforce, especially long-term temporary workers who did the same jobs as permanent workers for half the pay, and who were not eligible to join the union, that they felt compelled to organize an entirely new union, ATU, in order to give workers a real voice. As a spokesperson for the new union reported, “All the Toyota group companies are putting pressures on workers to increase their global competitiveness while spreading out the cost cutting schemes at a breakneck pace. As a result, [the] majority of the workers suffer from low wages and long working hours while being forced to work under extremely harsh working conditions where health hazards or mental problems are not uncommon and even ‘overwork death’ is widely observed.” (http://www.labornet.org/news/0306/horizu.htm). More recently, on August 26, 2009, Toyota announced that it will “suspend production at one of two lines at a factory in [Japan] from Spring of next year until the second half of 2011, lowering its overall capacity by 220,000 vehicles.” (http://www.manufacturing.net/News-Toyota-Scales-Back-Production-In-Japan-082609.aspx). Toyota’s announcement did not give any indication regarding the fate of the workers while the factory is half shut down. So much for “mutual trust between labor and management”!
You also cannot count on your union leaders to mount an effective campaign in your defense. Again, the truth here is ugly. The UAW leadership long ago abandoned class struggle militancy for business unionism. All the union bureaucrats know how to do is beg politicians and corporations for crumbs. When the US government bailed out GM, the Obama administration and GM’s failed leadership cut a deal with the UAW that amounted to a vicious attack on the company’s diminished workforce. When it comes down to a real battle, their idea of how to resolve it is to sell out the membership by agreeing to let the auto companies cut the workers’ pay and benefits and institute mass layoffs. As the GM bankruptcy shows, these tactics do not save companies in the long run. They lead only to a dead end for rank and file workers.
What are the tactics that will work? We can learn a valuable lesson from the militant mass actions of the 1930s. In the heyday of the UAW, auto workers marched in mass picket lines and occupied factories with sit-down strikes. These successful actions included the six-week factory occupations at the Flint Chevrolet and Fisher Body plants in 1937, and the “Battle of the Overpass” at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Complex later that same year. The workers’ efforts were backed by heroic acts of solidarity on the part of tens of thousands of other union members, together with their families and communities. These are the only tactics that have been proven to win major gains for workers. Indeed, the high standard of living that auto workers enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s could not have been achieved without these actions.
And this is not just history. The same types of mass, militant, rank-and-file worker actions are still being used successfully today by workers in France, the French Caribbean, and Latin America. In the US, millions of Latino workers, supported by the ILWU, organized a massive general strike of immigrant workers on May Day in 2006 and 2007, closing hundreds of businesses nationwide, and stopping port traffic all along the West Coast. More recently, workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago and the Stella D’oro bakery plant in New York have shown the effectiveness of plant occupations and strikes.
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