On September 23, 2019, Marcus Day writes on WSWS.org:
As the strike by over 49,000 General Motors autoworkers in the US enters the second week, a warning must be made: the strike is in danger of defeat at the hands of the United Auto Workers bribe-takers.
The GM strike has drawn the support and sympathy not only of workers at Ford, Fiat Chrysler and in other industries, but also in other countries—Mexico, Canada, Brazil, and elsewhere—where workers are looking to fight back against the profit-driven attacks of the corporations.
But the UAW does not have a strategy to win the strike; it has a strategy to lose it. The strike can be won, but only if it is taken out of the hands of the corrupt UAW bureaucracy, who hope to isolate and starve out GM workers.
There is no time to lose. To prevent the strike’s defeat, workers must immediately form rank-and-file factory committees to take control of their struggle. Adequate resources and support must be mobilized! Strike pay must be raised to $750 a week, the walkout must be expanded to include workers at Ford and Fiat Chrysler, and an urgent appeal must be issued for the support of workers in other industries and other countries.
Workers demonstrate outside a General Motors facility in Langhorne, Pa., Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2019. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The UAW is working out of a playbook used by the union bureaucracy throughout the 1980s and ’90s: isolate workers in their struggles, refuse to mobilize the full strength of the working class, wait until workers are starved out, and force through concessions. They’ve done it countless times before, and they’re preparing to do it again.
Throughout the entire stage-managed contract “negotiations” at GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler, the UAW has kept its membership in the dark, hiding its real aims. The UAW has issued no list of concrete demands, because it never drafted any.
The UAW received its marching orders from auto executives long ago: more temporary workers, worse working conditions, lower wages, and higher out-of-pocket health care costs. What are referred to as “contract negotiations” have in fact been backroom strategy sessions between union and company officials to work out the most effective way to ram through these new attacks.
GM is dead set on lowering its labor costs, and the UAW knows it. More than just GM’s profit margin is on the line: The framework set in the upcoming contract would serve as a new baseline for the exploitation of workers not just at Ford and Fiat Chrysler, but throughout the auto and other manufacturing industries more broadly, with implications for the entire global capitalist economic system.
Behind GM, those who hold their purse strings on Wall Street have made clear they will accept no concessions to workers.
The conspiracy of the UAW and the companies, however, has been upended by the escalating corruption scandal, which has revealed that the UAW is a criminal gang, bought and paid for by management.
Less than a month ago, the FBI raided the homes of the current UAW president, Gary Jones, and his predecessor, Dennis Williams, along with other UAW locations. Meanwhile, a growing number of high-level union officials have been locked up or indicted for using illicit funds to bankroll high-end lifestyles. The latest, Jeffery Pietrzyk, is a former co-director of the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources, who was charged last Friday.
UAW President Jones and UAW Region 5 Director Vance Pearson have largely spent their time in recent weeks talking with their attorneys and the Justice Department, primarily “negotiating” the length of their potential jail terms.
Feeling no choice but to call a strike last Sunday, the UAW is now starving striking workers on only $250 a week in strike pay, which will only be distributed beginning on the 15th day of the strike. This miserable amount is aimed at creating economic pressure on workers to accept the company’s terms, while ensuring that as little as possible is depleted from the UAW’s $750 million “strike fund,” which the executives use as their slush fund.
In the clearest and most damning indication that it is planning to sabotage the struggle, the UAW has stonewalled demands by autoworkers for an all-out strike against the auto industry, keeping its 100,000-plus members at Ford and Fiat Chrysler on the job.
Many autoworkers know the UAW is plotting a betrayal. To prevent this and win the struggle, the following is essential:
1. The conduct of the strike must be taken out of the hands of the UAW through the formation of rank-and-file factory committees. Workers must hold meetings outside the view of the UAW and management, elect representatives from the most militant and trusted workers, and assemble to formulate their own demands, including:
* The abolition of the multi-tier system
* An immediate wage hike of 40 percent and restoration of cost-of-living pay (COLA)
* The conversion of all temporary and part-time workers to full-time
* The reopening of Lordstown and other closed plants and the immediate rehiring of all laid-off workers
* Fully paid-for health care and pensions
2. The strike must be immediately expanded to include Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers . As an autoworker at Ford Chicago Assembly Plant told the Autoworker Newsletter, “Everyone here is asking, ‘Why aren’t we all out together!?’”
An appeal must be made for support from the entire working class: at auto parts and supplier plants, in the shipping, logistics and steel industries, and beyond.
3. The struggle must be linked up and coordinated internationally. Workers cannot fight and beat one of the largest transnational corporations on the planet on a national basis. GM workers must appeal to their real allies: the millions and billions of workers around the world who are coming into struggle and looking to fight against poverty and exploitation.
The GM strike is part of a global upsurge of working-class struggle. This year began with a wave of wildcat strikes by 70,000 auto parts and other workers in the maquiladora sweatshops in Matamoros, Mexico, who marched to the border and appealed for their class brothers and sisters in the US to join them.
Now, autoworkers in Mexico are supporting the strike of GM workers, with GM workers in Silao courageously organizing to oppose the attempts by the company to speed up production, risking their jobs and even lives. In online meetings held by the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter over the last two weeks, hundreds of workers from a number of countries participated—the US, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil—calling for solidarity and collaboration.
4. Workers must adopt a strategy that opposes their interests to those of the capitalist class. Autoworkers are engaged not just in a strike against GM, but in a political struggle. Representing the auto industry and Wall Street stands the capitalist state and two big business parties, from the Republican Donald Trump to the Democratic Party and all its presidential candidates.
The Trump administration is in close discussions with GM on finding a way to end the strike and push through a further restructuring of the auto industry, following on the Obama administration’s oversight of the 2009 bankruptcy, which set the terms of the abominable conditions workers now face.
Joseph Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are grandstanding and falsely professing their support for autoworkers at rallies this weekend and in the coming days. But if they think it becomes necessary, both the Democrats and Republicans are prepared to mobilize the police—as has already happened, most notably at GM’s Springhill, Tennessee, plant—or eventually the National Guard or other armed forces against striking workers.
To oppose this, a mass political movement and party of the working class must be built, independent of the capitalist parties.
If workers’ livelihoods and interests are to be secured, the auto industry must be reorganized as a public utility and placed under workers’ democratic control, as part of the fight for socialism, i.e., the running of society to meet human need, not the insatiable profit interests of the corporate and financial aristocracy.
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Gary Reber Comments:
This article pretty much depicts the tremendous challenges the labor movement and their union representatives face, as increasingly Americans, who are solely dependent on their labor worker wages to live, are up against the controlling “greedy” wealthy capital ownership class who they are essentially slaves to. Sadly, the present reality is the vast majority of Americans have become dependent on producer corporations that are narrowly owned for jobs as their ONLY means to earn an income.
This reality has been shaping since the Industrial Revolution. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital — which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor “worker” input and physical capital “worker” input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 240 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advances amplified the productive power of non-human capital, as it has to this day, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels. While historically, the expansion of productive technology had created jobs, today the trend is that the new jobs being created are increasingly being filled by a “machine” at inception, while the jobs remaining still rest in the crosshairs of technological development and application.
Practically all of our manufacturing corporations have chosen to outsource their parts and finished product manufacturing, to varying degrees, to slave wage labor and non-regulated countries. As a consequence, American corporations have become (and increasingly are becoming) no longer dependent on American workers or consumers as they seek lower production costs and expanded consumer markets in other countries. Currently, any time corporations feel their operations are “threatened” vis-à-vis less profitability, they shut down factories and jobs in our homeland, and move their manufacturing out of the United States, investing in the development of slave wage labor countries and creating jobs there, sharing American technological innovations and inventions that enable efficient production.
Such overseas operations have the advantage of “sweat-shop” slave labor rates relative to American standards, low or no taxation, State subsidies, supportive infrastructure provisions, currency manipulation, and few if any environmental regulations — which translate to lower-cost production. Thus, producing the same product or service in the United States would be more expensive. For most people, economic globalization means a growing gap between rich and poor, technological alienation of the labor worker from the means of production, and the phenomenon of global corporations and strategic alliances forcing labor workers in high-cost wage markets, such as the United States, to compete with labor-saving capital tools and lower-paid foreign workers.
We live in a world driven through the one-factor lens of workers and demands for more pay for the same work input (or less) as automation and “machine” inputs continue to out-produce labor’s input. Yet there is never a focus on the necessity for workers to gain ownership stakes in the non-human productive capital assets that are replacing them in the production of good, products, and services. Instead, it is the same old fight for more wages and benefits, which is an added cost to production, and a fight against automation and “machines” that replace workers. These “old” ways will no longer work in the advancing age of all-encompassing non-human “automation” of the means of production.
The fight to unify the working class in the United States and elsewhere should be a fight to gain ownership stakes in the corporations who employ them. Yet, the fight is always the same –– “pay us more wages.”
Americans need to understand the anger and developing turmoil as it relates to job losses and the devaluation of labor value amongst auto workers and all other workers who feel taken advantage of by the owners of businesses who rely on both labor and the non-human factor –– productive capital “automated” and “machine” assets –– to produce goods, products, and services. Increasingly, and at a rapid rate, workers are being dismissed as tectonic shifts in the technologies of product replace them and devalue labor’s worth.
We must recognize that human life, dignity, and liberty require that each person has the power and independent means to support and sustain one’s own life, dignity, and liberty –– i.e. through one’s own private property rights (personal or shared control) and rights to the full fruits or “profits” in what one owns. Thus, we, as a society need to aim to structurally diffuse economic power by democratizing access to capital ownership for each person.
Historically and in its present form, the labor movement is destructive in that it agrees with the idea that propertyless people should exist to serve those who own property. In other words, keep the working class in the servitude to the wealthy capital ownership class. The labor movement doesn’t seek to end wage slavery; it merely seeks to improve the condition of the wage slave. If it actually cared about human rights and freedom, it wouldn’t call itself the “labor movement.”
The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today –– wages, hours, and working conditions –– and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.
Everyone in union negotiating positions should be advocating for a union movement transformation to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for economic democracy. They should play the part that they have always aspired to, that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.
When labor unions transform to producers’ ownership unions, opportunity will be created for the unions to reach out to all shareholders (stock owners) who are not adequately represented on corporate boards, and eventually all labor workers will want to join an ownership union in order to be effectively represented as an aspiring capital owner. The overall strategy should assure that the labor compensation of the union’s members does not exceed the labor costs of the employer’s competitors, and that capital earnings of its members are built up to a level that optimizes their combined labor-capital worker earnings. A producers’ ownership union would work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments and broaden ownership. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.
The cause and effect of wage slavery is rooted in the Keynesian paradigm. Economist John Maynard Keynes, whose Keynesian model is widely taught, falsely presumed that the only way to balance mass productive power with mass purchasing power is through a wage system — ignoring the possibility of democratizing future ownership of labor-displacing productive capital technologies and rising ownership incomes as a market-generated means of eliminating wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery for the 99 percent of humanity. Binary economist (human and non-human productive inputs), corporate tax attorney, investment banker and author Louis O. Kelso argued that the Keynesian model fails to recognize that “when capital workers [owners] replace labor workers as the major suppliers of goods and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must engage to an increasing extent in capital work.”
It is imperative that leaders seeking new solutions cease the opportunity presented in presidential and congressional elections to implement effective programs for expanded ownership of productive capital, and address the problem of education on this subject.
At one point in 1976, the discussion led to The Joint Economic Committee of Congress endorsing a policy to broaden capital ownership as an economic goal for America. The 1976 Joint Economic Report stated: “To provide a realistic opportunity for more U.S. citizens to become owners of capital, and to provide an expanded source of equity financing for corporations, it should be made national policy to pursue the goal of broadened capital ownership. Congress also should request from the Administration a quadrennial report on the ownership of wealth in this country, which would assist in evaluating how successfully the base of wealth was being broadened over time.”
Unfortunately the Congress and no past or present President have never paid any attention to this policy, and the goal has subsequently been unacknowledged and unheeded by our plutocratic political leaders.
Instead, the American people have been promised that if the wealthy ownership class could gain even more earnings through low taxes and deregulation, the savings would be reinvested to grow the economy and create more and better jobs and higher wages. The focus has always been on job creation and wage growth, while the rich get richer by invisibly accumulating more capital asset ownership.Of course, there is always some truth to the idea that new jobs will be created through reinvestment, but jobs are eliminated as well, as the reinvestment is increasingly directed to the formation of new, highly-efficient non-human technological means of production, requiring far less workers and/or to extensions to other countries with lower labor costs and no or few regulations.
Americans should be smarter and realize that this is an underhanded scheme for the already wealthy and their heirs to OWN America and further concentrate and monopolize ownership of ALL productive capital, present and future. Such “trickle-down” thinking does not work. As a result of such unworkable policies, fewer and fewer people remain good “customers with money” to buy what the economy is capable of producing. And even then, as consumers, the vast majority of Americans have gone into consumption debt in order to provide for themselves and their families. Americans increasingly do not feel secure and are being challenged as to how to survive, faced with mounting over-extended consumer credit as well as less and less job security to earn sufficient income to pay off their debt. Unnecessarily, millions of Americans are faced with losing their savings and homes, and their jobs –– and their dreams for a better life –– with no way to earn through owning the wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital now formed and that which will be formed in the future.
As history has confirmed, better earnings and better job prospects did not and will not trickle down by lowering taxes on the wealthy and the corporations they own or deregulating the rules of responsible production. Responsibly growing the economy simultaneously with creating new capital owners, and thus “customers with money,” is the ONLY way to achieve inclusive prosperity and economic justice.
On the basic issue of economic empowerment of each individual, the essential goal needs to be economic democracy, which will finally make political democracy a meaningful reality.
The emphasis on the systemic injustices of monopoly capitalism can only be addressed by comprehensive reforms to the tax, monetary and inheritance policies favoring the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to slave-wage labor countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth (with past savings requirements) that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what capital ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and capital ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through concentrated ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percent equal opportunity to become capital owners.
The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and services,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor — physical capital — is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority — and ultimately 100 percent — of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
For an in-depth overview of solutions to economic inequality, see my article “Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11.
For even more in-depth reading about solution to bring about a new economic paradigm:
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement (also known as “Economic Personalism”) at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/ and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/
Support the Unite America Party Platform, published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/platform-of-the-unite-ame_b_5474077.html.
