As Wall Street demands
new auto job cuts, UAW rants against Mexico and China
By Jerry White
26 July 2017
26 July 2017
General Motors announced second-quarter profits
of $1.6 billion Tuesday, beating Wall Street expectations. Ford is scheduled to
release its results today and Fiat Chrysler on Thursday, as the US-based
automakers continue to record high profits even as sales of sedan-sized cars
decline and companies extend their summer production shutdowns.
GM, which is carrying out a global
restructuring, including winding down its operations in Europe, India, South
Africa and Venezuela, has aggressively responded to Wall Street demands to lay
off thousands of workers hired over the last seven years now that the sales
boom has slowed. The Detroit-based auto giant has eliminated production shifts
in Ohio and Michigan and carried out thousands of temporary and permanent job
cuts even as it funnels more than $10 billion into dividend payments and stock
buybacks for wealthy shareholders.
On Tuesday, GM Chief Financial Officer Chuck
Stevens told investors that GM will cut North American production by 150,000
vehicles in the second half of 2017. Analysts have floated the possibility of
shutting plants that produce slow-selling cars, including the factory in
Lordstown, Ohio and GM’s only assembly plant in Detroit.
The United Auto Workers union has blocked any
resistance by workers to job cuts. Echoing management, the UAW claims that the
layoffs are due to “market conditions,” not the relentless drive by Wall Street
to slash costs and transfer money from wages and benefits to dividends and
stock repurchase programs.
Asked by a reporter about the fate of the
Lordstown and Detroit plants, UAW president Dennis Williams could barely rouse
himself. “Shutdowns, layoffs, market slowing—that raises our eyebrows,”
Williams murmured. Then sounding like a paid consultant, he added, “The
employer miscalculated the build cycle. There was a lot of overtime while
stocks were growing. They have to get better at balancing so employees stay
employed.”
What really got Williams excited was his
announcement that the UAW will be holding a contest on Labor Day for the best
social media, television and radio material to promote the union’s “Buy
American” campaign. “We want to educate the public on why it is important to
buy American and how it supports one another as a people, as a nation,” Williams
said.
Williams said it was sometimes difficult to
determine the origin of a vehicle and that he would prefer that big labels,
with flags, be plastered in the windshields of new cars, saying “China,”
“Mexico,” “The United States” and “Canada.” The UAW president went out of his
way to praise President Trump’s economic nationalist program, boosting the lie
that the billionaire president’s trade war measures would improve the fortunes
of American workers.
To call the complacent company hacks in the UAW
hierarchy Neanderthals has always been a slight to our prehistoric ancestors.
There is no such thing as an “American-made” car, any more than a Japanese- or
German-made car. It is more likely, in fact, that one will find more
“American-made” parts in a Toyota Camry produced in Georgetown, Kentucky than
most vehicles made in GM, Ford and Chrysler factories in Detroit.
Autoworkers around the world are employed in one
of the most globally-integrated industries on the planet, involving a
world-wide division of labor. The relentless effort by the global corporations
to drive down the living standards of workers is not due to “unfair trade,” let
alone “globalization” in itself. It is product of the capitalist profit system,
which is based on pumping the maximum amount of profit out of workers in every
country.
Williams could not pass up the opportunity to
pollute the consciousness of workers with toxic nationalism. Asked if Ford had
discussed its plans to move production of the small Ford Focus to China,
Williams blasted, “If they are going to produce in China and keep it in China
for that economy, that’s fine. But employers produce it in China and bring it
back like [GM’s Buick] Envision. I am not happy about the Envision, which I
refer to as the ‘invasion.’ I feel the same about the Focus. If they want to
produce in China, then sell it in China.”
Asked about future plant closings, Williams
responded, “When an employer like GM, Ford or any other employer produces so
many vehicles in Mexico and around the world and brings them back for sales,
and comes to us with a plant closing, there is going to be a problem with us.
Any corporation that deals with us and has that kind of philosophy, they are
going to have an issue with the UAW. You’ll hear me loud and clear.”
Nobody in GM or Ford headquarters were shaking
under their desks over Williams’ hot air. The UAW has not lifted a finger to
oppose a single plant closing in 40 years. Instead, its incessant ranting
against workers in Japan, China, Mexico and other countries for supposedly
“stealing American jobs” has been used as a cover for the UAW’s collusion in
the shutdown of scores of factories and the elimination of hundreds of
thousands of jobs.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, as then-UAW
President Douglas Fraser was brought on to the Chrysler board of directors, the
UAW conducted a vicious anti-Japanese campaign, which included sledgehammer
parties to destroy Toyotas, the banning of “foreign-made” cars from factory and
union parking lots, and the sale of bumper stickers declaring “Remember Pearl
Harbor.” This racist agitation led to the 1982 murder of Chinese-American
Vincent Chin by a Chrysler foreman and his son.
Meanwhile, the UAW banned strikes, abandoned any
shop floor representation and insisted that workers accept speedup, management
abuses and wage and benefit concession to “boost competitiveness” and corporate
profitability. Annual wage increases, cost of living adjustments, job security
provisions, layoff protections and everything else was abandoned, and the UAW
introduced multi-tier wage and benefit systems.
Not a single job was defended. Instead such
policies led to the catastrophe that can be seen in the shuttered factories and
decaying schools and neighborhoods. Far from sharing the fate of autoworkers,
however, the UAW business executives thrived through the proliferation of joint
labor-management “training centers,” “scholarship funds,” banking, real estate
and other business ventures.
Today, the UAW functions as an unabashed tool of
management, and its executives like Williams, Cindy Estrada and others sit on
corporate boards, manage billions of dollars of corporate stocks and have a
direct financial incentive to cut the wages, health care and retirement
benefits of the workers they falsely claim to represent.
Pointing to the labor agreements signed by the
UAW in 2015—in the face of mass opposition from rank-and-file workers—GM
finance chief Chuck Stevens boasted to Wall Street analysts last year, “We have
a much more flexible workforce, enabling us to react to market dynamics and
take costs out more aggressively compared with past cycles.” This includes
thousands of new part-time and temporary workers sanctioned by the UAW who have
short layoff benefits, making it easier to cut jobs.
Williams first floated
the idea of resurrecting the campaign against “foreign-made” vehicles last
February, just weeks after the inauguration of President Trump. In March,
Williams appeared alongside
Trump and then-Ford CEO Mark Fields at the site of an abandoned World War II
bomber factory in the Detroit area. Trump praised the collaboration of the
unions, management and the government in building weaponry to win the war, and
alluded to his plans for a massive military buildup to “Make America Great
Again.”
While tens of millions of workers hate Trump for
his attacks on health care and public education, the mass deportation of
immigrants and reckless militarism, the UAW and other unions have found kindred
spirits in Trump and his fascist aide Stephen Bannon.
A fight against a new round of layoffs is
needed. The allies of American workers in this struggle are not the American
corporate bosses, Trump or the Democrats, who are no less pawns of Wall Street
than the Republicans. The allies of workers in the US are the autoworkers of
Slovenia, Serbia, Korea, France, Mexico, China and around the world who are
entering similar battles. New organizations, controlled by the rank-and-file
and dedicated to the methods of the class struggle, not class collaboration,
are needed.
Above all, the fight for
good-paying jobs and all the social rights of the working class requires a
conscious struggle to unite workers against the capitalist system and the two
corporate-controlled parties that defend it. Economic life must be organized
based on socialist principles, to meet the needs of the masses of working
people who create society’s wealth, not the corporate and financial parasites
that monopolize it.
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