The Strike at General Motors

48,000 members of the United Auto Workers of America (UAW), the regime union representing Auto Workers in the United States, went on an unexpected strike at General Motors from the 16th of September to the 25th of October. The strike cost GM more than $2bn, according to Wall Street estimates. It closed 34 GM manufacturing and distribution facilities across the USA. It also disrupted operations in Mexico and Canada.

General Motors, which produces the Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac brands in North America, is North America’s largest automaker.

Demands

It’s hard to discuss workers’ demands as there was no plan and no real membership discussion before the strike vote occurred. The UAW leadership was seen as using the strike as an attempt to regain legitimacy amongst workers after a series of scandals. As typical of regime unions, the scandals continued and the leaderships’ handling of the strike has only increased anger towards them.

Labor Notes magazine observed: 

The strike was declared suddenly, with no guidance from top bargainers on its goals. When I visited the picket line at Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly on the first day, workers couldn’t tell me what they were going out for. But remarkably, a consensus soon emerged. Most workers I interviewed over eight visits to the line said their top priority was “make everyone equal” or “hire the temps.”

The above quote shows how workers are open to stuggle when they feel and see that what is going on is a real strike. So the methods of struggle are as important as goals. This is the reason why the ICP always fights to organize real strikes: without notice, with no estabilished deadline, with picket lines to stop entry and exit of goods and to wipe away the scabs.

Pay for GM workers is a series of tiers, depending on when you started. Older workers get paid more for work than more recently hired workers – this a provision pushed through by the “progressive” Obama administration in the U.S. Govern-ment’s bailout of GM in 2008. More and more GM is also using temporary (precarious) workers who have no work guarentee and no benefits. In the US, the notoriously expensive health care system is provided, if provided at all, by your employer. By implimenting tiered work scales and through the use of temporary workers, the company can lower costs in providing health care, placing workers in dire straits.

Corruption in the UAW

Just before the GM strike was called a series of corruption charges were brought by the US Federal Government against primarily UAW officials but some company executives as well. The charges dealt with bribes and kickbacks given to UAW officers.

We have to say that in our view is not just the corruption that make a union a regime one but its principles, its methods of struggle, its internal life, and its whole history, since founding forward, across the class struggle. Nevertheless corruption cases like these are a manifestation of the nature of a union which has gone over to the side of the bosses for decades.

Opposition Groups

There are small pockets of organized internal resistance in the UAW. The current UAW was called a “One Party State” by a militant and former official back in the 1950s. Since that time the union has become the party of the corporations.

Since 1990 there have been some well organized caucuses within the union fighting for a pro-worker direction. “New Directions Caucus” especially seemed to have some movement until its leadership was pulled into the union leadership. “Soldiers Of Solidarity” was more of a rank and file insurgency in the first decade of the 2000s.

Today there are no well organized rank and file groups.

The Solidarity Review is a group organized around publishing articles critical of the present leadership, which is important, but really has no organization. “Autoworkers Caravan” is a protest movement more in line with Soldiers of Solidarity – loose knit and mainly a social networking phenomenon, but unfortunately not as organized as the Teachers union groups which won so much.

International Aspects

Canada and Mexico play important parts in Auto manufacturing in North America. Mexico makes many of the  parts to be assembled in the United States – so the finished product can be marketed as “American made”. Canadian auto manufacturing is much more integrated into the much larger American market with many parts and assembly plants located in the Canadian province of Ontario – just across the Windsor River from the center of American production in Detroit, Michigan.

The Canadian Auto Workers and American union were the same until 1985 when the Canadians split because of American union’s willingness to sign concessionary contracts, often to the disadvantage of their Canadian members. The American habit of ignoring their Canadian fellow workers again popped up when the American’s showed no organized solidarity with the Candians wildcat strike against the closing of a GM assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario which would eliminate 2,500 production jobs at the plant and 2,500 union workers in auto parts suppliers, etc. The Canadians repaid the American’s lack of solidarity in kind.

The Maquiladora are special economic zones of Mexico which provide low cost labor for American industry. In Silao, Guanajuato, Mexico at least five workers at the GM – Silao plant were fired for trying to aid the American strikers by advocating a strike in that plant, a slow down against increased production to substitute for lost American production as well as advocating workers leaving the corrupt regime union. For more on the Maquiladoras see “Wildcat Strikes in Mexico” in The Communist Party #12.

Class Unionism’s lack of Organization vs the Regime Unions

The contract which came out of the strike negated the strikers’ desires articulated on the picket lines above. Multiple tiers of pay continue, temporary work remains temporary rather than permanent, health care costs and risks are being dumped upon the workers. The contract was accepted by a 57% to 43% margin. The success was ensured through a number of bribes such as tying bonuses to yes vote.

The failure of the strike is being widely presented as a case of greed and betrayal by the company and union officials. This is an important flaw in analysis.

First of all, capitalist companies are against the workers not because of the bosses’ greed but because capitalist competition imposes a need, in order to survive, to exploit workers. This exploitation will grow more and more as the global economic crisis advances. Secondly, it is incorrect to talk about a betrayal by the UAW leaders. This union and its leaders, like the whole AFL-CIO, have been for decades openly with the bosses and for class collaborationist unionism. The only class the UAW leadership could betray is the bourgeoisie – somethning that they will never do. The attitude of UAW leaders in this strike is just a confirmation of the regime nature of this union.

But this is just half of the problem. The other is the lack of organization by workers willing to fight and the militants of class unionism, inside and outside the UAW. The strike failed because there was no counter-organization to the bosses and their union hirelings. The militants of class unionism have to coordinate themselves to get recognition from workers in struggle that they are the real alternative leadership in the struggle and to achieve the possibility of effectively jointly organizing an opposition to regime unionism.

This “Coordination” can’t be built on a party basis. It can’t be a united front of parties – of any nature – but a united front of militant workers for class unionism. To keep it’s own nature it has to be open only to workers, employed and unemployed, not to members of other classes or social strata.