On September 16, 2019, the editorial board writes on WSWS.org:
Forty-six thousand General Motors workers walked out at midnight Sunday evening. The shutdown of 35 manufacturing facilities in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas and New York will cost GM as much as $400 million in lost production each day.
Despite frantic efforts to avoid a strike, the leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW)—who have been exposed as criminally corrupt agents of the auto companies—concluded that they were not in a position to prevent a mass walkout.
The announcement of the strike was delivered at a press conference by UAW Vice President Terry Dittes. Demoralized and frightened, Dittes spoke as if he were attending a funeral.
Just the day before, the UAW had instructed its members to cross the picket lines of janitorial workers belonging to the same union. The UAW has refused to call out workers employed at Ford and Fiat Chrysler, seeking as best as they can to avoid mobilizing the full strength of autoworkers.
Workers picket outside the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant in Hamtramck, Mich., Monday, Sept. 16, 2019. Roughly 49,000 workers at General Motors plants in the U.S. went on strike just before midnight Sunday, but talks between the UAW and the automaker will resume. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
The shutdown of General Motors is a major escalation of the class struggle in the United States and internationally. The powerful social movement that began last year with teachers is expanding into the industrial working class. The decades-long suppression of the class struggle—ruthlessly enforced by an alliance of trade unions, corporations and the government—is breaking down.
As workers begin this fight, they must survey the battlefield and develop a strategy based on an understanding of who are their allies and who are their enemies.
Workers are confronting General Motors, the symbol of the power of American capitalism, with a market capitalization of $55 billion. But GM is itself part of a globally-integrated auto industry, involving the labor of millions of workers all over the world.
Every struggle by workers has a political dimension, but in this case the politics are especially clear. The auto industry has, for 40 years, been the target of efforts by Democratic and Republican administrations to expand corporate profits at the expense of the working class.
Forty years ago, in 1979, the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Party-controlled Congress insisted that the bailout of Chrysler required massive concessions by workers and the closure of factories. This was followed soon after by the Republican Reagan administration’s firing of PATCO air traffic controllers, which launched a wholesale assault on the entire working class.
In 2009, the Obama administration insisted on halving the wages of all new hires as part of its restructuring of the auto industry. The mass layoffs, plant closures and pay cuts imposed under Obama led to record profits for the automakers.
In the four decades of social counterrevolution, GM, Ford and Chrysler have slashed 600,000 auto jobs, with only 158,000 jobs left. The pay of a newly hired auto worker has fallen by half.
The expansion of corporate profits through the impoverishment of workers is the basic law of the capitalist system. Profit does not fall like manna from heaven: it is extracted at the point of production from the working class. The value created by workers through the labor process is distributed to the capitalists who exploit them.
The unjust and exploitative character of this system is demonstrated by the salaries of the auto executives and the billions of dollars disbursed to investors in the form of profit.
GM CEO Mary Barra, with her annual salary of $21.87 million, makes in a day twice what a new autoworker earns in a year. GM posted a profit of $11.8 billion last year. It has spent more than $10 billion on stock buybacks since 2015.
The claim that GM does not have the money to meet workers’ demands for a restoration of their pay and benefits should be dismissed with contempt.
Even as workers are fighting the corporations, the government and the capitalist system as a whole, their most determined enemy is the organization that claims to represent them—the bribed and corrupted United Auto Workers.
The UAW’s endless betrayals of workers’ interests have culminated in the cesspool of corruption that has engulfed the entire leadership, bribed to the tune of millions of dollars from management.
Everything workers are now fighting against, from plant closures to starvation wages and the multi-tier wage and benefit system, is the product of the concessions enforced by the UAW. To believe that this will now change is to indulge in the most dangerous illusions.
While the UAW officials were shown to have spent millions of dollars in workers’ money on golf outings, cigars, whiskey and prostitutes, the UAW has announced that workers will get a miserable $250 per week in strike pay—and this only after the first full week of a strike.
GM workers face many enemies, but they also have powerful allies.
Autoworkers enjoy overwhelming support and sympathy from the working population in America. The exploitative conditions that autoworkers are fighting against are those felt by millions of workers throughout the country, who have had their pay cut and benefits destroyed, and who are treated worse than the machines they operate.
Workers at GM must call on their brothers and sisters at Ford and Fiat Chrysler to join their strike in order to shut down the entire US auto industry and bring maximum economic and political pressure to bear on the auto bosses.
Just as importantly, workers must appeal for support from workers and youth throughout the country and around the world—support that they will readily receive.
The GM walkout is the latest stage in a global strike wave. The strike by US autoworkers is unfolding in the context of an international movement of the working class. Just last week, 8,000 GM workers went on strike in Korea, and French transit workers shut down the subways of Paris. Over the past year, auto workers in India and Mexico have waged powerful strikes. In France, Puerto Rico and Hong Kong, workers and youth have been involved in mass demonstrations in defense of their social and democratic rights.
The struggle can succeed only if it is taken out of the control of the UAW traitors. Workers must elect rank-and-file committees to organize and expand the strike.
These committees must demand:
● A 40 percent increase in pay to begin recovering decades of wages lost due to illegitimate concessions by the corrupt UAW and the corporations that bribed them.
● End the tier system! Equality in the workplace! All workers, including part-time and contract workers, must immediately be brought up to top pay and benefits.
● Restore jobs! Reopen Lordstown and other closed plants and rehire all laid-off and victimized workers. Stop all plant closings and layoffs!
● Honor the retirees! Reverse all cuts in retiree health care and pensions.
● Democracy in the factory! For workers’ control over production, line speed and safety.
● $750 per week in strike pay! The UAW, together with the AFL-CIO, controls billions of dollars in assets, which they use to fund junkets and pay six-figure salaries to thousands of executives. These resources, plundered from dues and retirement plans, must now be disbursed!
In this struggle, the Socialist Equality Party, which produces the Autoworker Newsletter and helps publish the World Socialist Web Site, pledges its full support to the workers.
The Socialist Equality Party will do everything it can to build a new militant socialist leadership in the working class. It will provide workers with the information they need to assist in the organization of their struggle and rally support throughout the country and internationally.
We call on workers to attend our upcoming online forum, which last week drew together more than 300 workers, to discuss the strategic issues that autoworkers face as they conduct this great and critical struggle.
Gary Reber Comments:
While not a socialist, I do 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 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.
One of the core planks of Senator Bernie Sanders’ platform is a total overhaul of the basic structure of union organizing.
Sanders would replace the old structure with sectoral bargaining, as seen in much of Europe. Under this model all the unions and all the employers in a particular industry negotiate a bargain for wages and benefits, and then the government extends the contract to cover every employee in the industry — whether they are members of a union or not. It is argued that this would drastically reduce the incentive for individual bosses to stop their workers from organizing, and stop investors from strategically directing capital to non-union firms.
But significantly, what is missing?
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. 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.”
Sanders, other political leaders and others 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.
Unfortunately, at the present time the movement is built on one-factor economics — the labor worker. The insufficiency of labor worker earnings to purchase increasingly capital-produced products and services gave rise to labor laws and labor unions designed to coerce higher and higher prices for the same or reduced labor input. With government assistance, unions have gradually converted productive enterprises in the private and public sectors into welfare institutions. Binary economist and author, Louis O. Kelso stated: “The myth of the ‘rising productivity’ of labor is used to conceal the increasing productiveness of capital and the decreasing productiveness of labor, and to disguise income redistribution by making it seem morally acceptable.”
Kelso argued that unions “must adopt a sound strategy that conforms to the economic facts of life. If under free-market conditions, 90 percent of the goods and services are produced by capital input, then 90 percent of the earnings of working people must flow to them as wages of their capital and the remainder as wages of their labor work… If there are in reality two ways for people to participate in production and earn income, then tomorrow’s producers’ union must take cognizance of both… The question is only whether the labor union will help lead this movement or, refusing to learn, to change, and to innovate, become irrelevant.”
Unions are the only group of people in the whole world who can demand a real, justice managed, equal allocation Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), who can demand the right to participate in the expansion of their employer by asserting their constitutional preferential rights to become capital owners, be productive, and succeed. The ESOP can give employees access to capital credit so that they can purchase the employer’s stock, pay for it in pre-tax dollars out of the earnings generated by the new assets that underlie that stock, and after the stock is paid for earn and collect the capital earnings income from it, and accumulate it in a tax haven until they retire, whereby they continue to be productive capital earners receiving income from their capital asset ownership stakes. This is a viable route to individual self-sufficiency needing significantly less or no government redistributive assistance.
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.
If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, governments will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it through owning “tools” as inputs to production or their labor and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that goods, products, and services are actually produced.
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.
Kelso stated, “Working conditions for the labor force have, of course, improved over the years. But the economic quality of life for the majority of Americans has trailed far behind the technical capabilities of the economy to produce creature comforts, and even further behind the desires of consumers to live economically better lives. The missing link is that most of those un-produced goods and services can be produced only through capital, and the people who need them have no opportunity to earn income from capital ownership.”
Kelso realized that the only way to make the economy work for everyone is to make it possible for everyone who consumes to produce what he consumes, and for everyone who produces to consume what he produces — Say’s Law of Markets, named for Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832).
Kelso concluded — given that advancing technology is displacing human labor from production — that the way to make everyone productive is to make it possible for “as many as possible of the people to become owners” of capital.
Advocates for economic equality of opportunity also should advocate that the union movement expand beyond representing corporate employees and represent capital ownership empowerment for all propertyless citizens.
As for the idea that workers create all value through the labor process, see https://just3rdway.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-circle-of-ownership.html?spref=fb&fbclid=IwAR2rRq1Uj9OA8kuEOHWB3LFLHY_U3gGGGe0P5stxJ6diZbh6k7q1QJz1ia8
