NUMMI/Toyota Workers and Friends:
Only YOU can save NUMMI workers’ jobs!
Organize NOW to occupy and take control of the plant!
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Where does that leave the NUMMI workers of today, and their supporters? The threatened closure of the NUMMI plant in March 2010 is still months away. That gives us the gift of time to organize an effective battle to stop it! But we must start acting soon in order to be ready when the time comes. Many workers employed by Toyota and other auto companies, in Japan, the US, and around the world, are or soon will be facing the same kinds of attacks – plant closures, layoffs, speedups, and wage and benefit cutbacks. A militant struggle by the NUMMI workers would set an example for these workers, and inspire solidarity actions in other plants and even in other industries.
What is the next step? Workers must organize factory committees to coordinate an occupation of the NUMMI plant before it closes! We can have no faith in the sell-out leadership of the UAW; only a revitalized democratic rank and file movement can lead us out of the crisis! An emergency conference of representatives of rank and file workers from different areas of the plant must be convened to elect rank-and-file, democratically run mobilization committees to plan and organize the struggle for occupation.
Working class communities around the factory, and the Bay Area labor movement, must be mobilized in advance to defend the occupation. Workers will need to prepare for self-defense against the reaction of the state! The community can also help by organizing solidarity kitchens to feed the workers and their families during the occupation; raising funds to help keep workers from losing their homes; and providing other emergency assistance. Our brother and sister Toyota workers in Japan and elsewhere can also help if we call on them for solidarity and support, and even coordinate joint actions if the circumstances are right.
What should we fight for? Toyota says it intends to abandon the NUMMI plant because it claims it cannot make a profit there. If this is true, then Toyota should have no problem turning the plant over to the workers to run. NUMMI must be controlled and operated by its workers, without compensation to GM or Toyota! Let the workers’ committees, accountable to and recallable instantly by all the workers in the plant, decide what is the best use for the plant and equipment. Open the books to give workers full access to all financial information about their company! Workers must take control of any government “bailout” funds used to shore up the company. Not a single worker should be laid off. All work should be shared among all those who can work, without loss of pay.
But only workers’ control can make this happen. A workers’ takeover of the NUMMI plant could set the stage for a movement toward workers’ control. But all forms of workers control cannot remain isolated. They must be defended by a workers’ government. When workers elsewhere see the NUMMI workers take the reins of their union and their factory into their own hands, they can be inspired to believe that they too can take control of their workplaces. Ultimately, workers can band together to bring down the capitalist system – which uses their labor and the natural resources that belong to all of us to generate profit for an elite few – and the bosses’ government, which subordinates human rights and environmental protection to corporate profit and Wall Street greed. Only the workers, acting together as a mighty political force, can fight capitalism and the power of the rich.
Hundreds of thousands of California state workers are under the ax of the capitalist state. A massive one day general strike shut down the state universities on September 24. That was a good start, but we need more than one day of strikes. We need to start preparing for massive assemblies of state workers, students, teachers, dock workers (ILWU), and all industrial workers, including NUMMI workers, with the support of the working class communities, to prepare a rank-and-file general strike to shut down the state of California. Down with the bureaucrats of the UAW and the rest of the union leadership that stand in the way of massive actions by the workers! Only the mighty strength of a united working class can fight the capitalist/imperialist system. Only a workers’ government can ultimately save the jobs of Toyota/NUMMI workers by taking over all the industries, the banks, and the financial institutions without compensation. Only a workers’ government, run by the workers, can and will be organized to produce goods and services for human needs, not for profit.
Down with Toyota’s plans for mass layoffs and closure of the NUMMI plant!
Jobs for all! Spread the work via a 30-hour work week at full pay!
Down with the UAW leaders’ “Buy American” chauvinism!
For international workers’ unity and solidarity against American imperialism and chauvinism!
Expel the parasitic union bureaucracy and replace it with an elected and recallable committee of militant rank-and-file workers!
Break with Obama! Defeat American imperialism and its troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere in the world!
For workers’ solidarity between Japanese and American workers against all attacks by Toyota and the auto industry!
For workers’ control over the auto plants in the US and Japan and the rest of the world!
For expropriation without compensation of Toyota plants and the entire auto industry!
Expropriate the banks and financial Institutions without compensation and put them under workers’ control!
For workers’ governments in the US and Japan to carry out these tasks!
For international workers’ solidarity and worldwide socialism as the only effective means to end attacks by multinational corporations and global capitalism on workers, their families, and the environment!
Endorsed by Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism
and the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction