On October 7, 2019, Tim Rivers and Tom Hall write on WSWS:
GM workers on the picket discussed the need for an international strategy for the expansion of their strike with the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter this weekend.
“Pro-capitalism—that is the core of the problem. And it’s across the board—worldwide!” a veteran worker at Flint Truck Assembly said.
“When people who don’t work in the auto industry ask me what this strike is about, I tell them it is about setting a global standard. It is about the working class worldwide. We need to set the global standard for a livable wage for everybody.”
“This is class war. It is a global strategy to pit us against each other,” he said. “Like Silao, Mexico [where GM workers have been fired for supporting the strike in the US]. They would love to stand with us. We want to stand with them.”
“Everybody needs to be able to make a livable wage. Not just here in America,” he continued. “I say everywhere around the world. I have seen poverty everywhere. I have traveled in the world, and it all equals the same thing.”
The worker drew the connection between the exploitation of GM’s international workforce and the hollowing out of Flint, the company’s birthplace and former base of operations. “I have seen what it did to the city of Flint. It decimated the economy and the social structure. We went from a city of home owners, to a city of tenants, to an empty city. Now they are trying to rebuild the city and bring labor and residents back in, but not at a livable wage. Every new job is at $10 an hour.”
He denounced the abuse of temporary workers, who are paid a fraction of the wages of full timers with fewer benefits and who are left at the mercy of the company. “Some temps have been in the plant as long as five and six years. Some do several years over at the metal fabrication plant and now they are doing more years as temps over here at the assembly plant.”
There is widespread anger with the conduct of the strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW), which is working behind the scenes to shut down the strike and enforce a sellout. It has kept workers in the dark about the content of its talks with the company, and is forcing Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers to remain on the job, where they are working forced overtime to stockpile vehicles.
In addition, the UAW is deliberately wearing down autoworkers with poverty strike pay of $250 per week. A worker at GM’s CCA parts distribution center near Flint reported that working mothers at the facility are using Gofundme to meet expenses and selling blood plasma to survive. Meanwhile, UAW officials continue to rake in bloated salaries of thousands of dollars per week.
The Flint striker rejected the toxic nationalism which has long been the stock in trade of the United Auto Workers, which pits workers in the US against their brothers and sisters in Mexico and other countries in the name of defending “American” jobs. “The UAW wants us to feel that we can’t stand with [Mexican workers] because they are not American employees.”
“I have been watching the union’s strategies unfold since GM set out to break the UAW in the late 1980s. And they have been working on us ever since.”
“[The UAW] pushed the bankruptcy through,” he said, referring to the Obama administration’s forced bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler in 2009. The UAW was rewarded for its role in the bankruptcy with billions of dollars in GM stock. “They really didn’t have to go bankrupt, but it was a good way to liquidate debt. They utilized that to keep us from asking for more benefits and more wages.”
Gary Reber Comments:
Autoworkers only have their withholding of their labor and blocking scab labor from replacing them as their weapon against the “hoggish” controlling owners of General Motors. Some workers see the UAW, their union, as corrupt. Some believe that the conduct of the struggle must be taken out of the hands of the corrupt UAW. This requires the organization of rank-and-file strike and factory committees, independent of the UAW, to commit to fight for the demands workers and their families need, which should include ownership stakes in the future growth of General Motors.
The isolation of the GM strike must be broken, and the struggle escalated. This means bringing out the 100,000-plus Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers in an industry-wide strike to shut down auto production. Some argue that the auto companies and their investors are relying on the UAW to keep the struggle contained to GM.
The outcome of the strike will determine conditions of life for millions of workers across not just the auto industry, but all workplaces for years to come.
What is involved is not just a dispute with one powerful company. Through this contract, the ruling class is conspiring to dramatically alter class relations and transfer trillions of dollars more from the working class to the financial aristocracy. Autoworkers are taking a stand for the entire working class.
What GM is trying to force upon its workforce is corporate America’s dream vision of the future: an army of temporary workers with no rights who can be thrown onto the street at will; factories that can be shuttered by the company as it wishes; the elimination of employer-provided healthcare; rising productivity through speedup with lower wages and higher injury rates.
GM’s demands are an effort by Wall Street to “uberize” and “Amazonify” the international workforce, ensuring the highest possible level of exploitation to increase profits and inflate the stock market. Just yesterday, General Electric announced an end to pensions for 10,000 workers. It is a plan for mass poverty. If successful, the ruling class’s strategy will push millions of workers past the brink of physical and mental exhaustion for generations to come.
GM’s ruthlessness is not merely the product of corporate “greed,” although there is plenty of that to go around. The greed flows from the demands of the capitalist system and the material interests of GM’s powerful shareholders.
Seventy-nine percent of GM shares are owned by institutional shareholders, including 7.8 percent by Capital Research and Management, 7.0 percent by Vanguard, 5.0 percent by Berkshire Hathaway and 4.3 percent by BlackRock.
According to a 2017 study published in the journal Business and Politics, the world’s top three institutional investors—Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock—“are the largest shareholder of 1,662 of the 3,900 publicly traded US corporations accounting for… 78 percent of the total market capitalization of US firms,” including GM. These companies have “a current market capitalization of more than $17 trillion, possess assets worth almost $23.9 trillion, and employ more than 23.5 million people.”
The study concluded that the three most powerful institutional investors “occupy a position of unrivaled potential power over corporate America,” and that there is “a concentration of corporate ownership not seen since the days of JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller.” The top three “have the potential to cause significant changes to the political economy of the United States.”
That is exactly what Wall Street is seeking to accomplish through the GM contract.
The strike pay must be tripled to $750 per week. This is necessary to sustain a real fight. This can be paid for with the $800 million strike fund and by forcing a pay freeze on all UAW officials, especially the over 450 officials who make over $100,000 per year and are receiving full pay during the strike.
Workers must then set their own demands. For decades, workers have been told they must subordinate their demands to “market realities.” On this basis, hundreds of factories have been closed, millions of jobs have been lost, and wages have been brought down to levels that preceded the historic auto strikes of the 1930s.
