[Onthebarricades] US: Auto-workers strike; union surrenders

[Andy]

Total surrender by US auto union
By the WSWS editorial board 
27 September 2007

The United Auto Workers union called off the strike by 73,000 auto 
workers against General Motors early Wednesday morning and announced 
a tentative contract that represents a total surrender to the 
massive concessions demands of the company.

The union's suppression of the strike after only two days, during 
which the workers shut down all of the auto giant's US facilities, 
demonstrates the urgent necessity for auto workers to free 
themselves from the grip of the UAW and develop their struggle 
against the destruction of jobs, wages, health benefits and pensions 
on a fundamentally new basis and with new organizations entirely 
independent of the parasitic and corrupt UAW bureaucracy.

The new basis of struggle is, above all, political-the fight for the 
independent political mobilization of the working class against 
America's corporate oligarchy and the twin parties of big business.

GM workers should emphatically reject the betrayal worked out by the 
UAW in connivance with General Motors. More fundamentally, however, 
they must draw the bitter lessons of the aborted strike.

The GM strike-the first national auto strike in three decades and 
the first at GM since the 67-day strike in 1970-was an expression of 
the growing discontent and resistance among workers in the US and 
internationally. The workers manned picket lines to fight against 
the company's plans to destroy health benefits for retirees, slash 
wages, undermine pensions and continue the assault on jobs.

For the UAW, however, the strike was from the outset a cynical 
maneuver whose main aims were to provide a cover for its collusion 
with management, provide a harmless outlet for the anger of the rank-
and-file, and use the workers as pawns in its tussle with GM over 
the terms of a deal that will relieve the company of its legal 
obligations to retirees and turn the union into a corporate entity 
controlling a multi-billion-dollar retiree health trust fund.

The union called off the strike just at the point when it was 
beginning to cripple GM's operations throughout Canada and Mexico. 
There can be little doubt that the union's conduct of the strike 
from the outset was coordinated with GM to do the least financial 
damage to the company.

The deal that UAW President Ron Gettelfinger announced Wednesday was 
in all likelihood agreed to before the strike. It in no significant 
way differs from the agenda for transforming the US auto industry 
into a low-wage, sweatshop operation announced by the company in 
advance of the strike.

At no point were the interests of auto workers represented in the 
negotiations. The closed-door talks had the character of haggling 
between two corporate entities, each vying for the best possible 
terms for its commercial interests. Except that the UAW exhibited 
none of the intransigence and combativity of GM's corporate rivals, 
earning Gettelfinger the well-deserved contempt of those on the 
other side of the bargaining table.

The union will be unsparing in the lies it peddles in its attempt to 
convince GM workers to ratify the agreement. But the reality was 
demonstrated by the verdict of Wall Street, which celebrated the 
historic renunciation of the most basic conditions of auto workers 
by driving up GM shares by a huge 9.4 percent, or $3.22. Ford Motor 
Co. shares rose 6.5 percent, on the expectation that the UAW will 
grant it a similar cost-cutting deal.

The UAW sits on a "strike fund" of $950 million. This would be 
sufficient to sustain strike benefits-even if they were raised from 
the paltry $200 a week allotted by the union leadership-for many 
weeks. But, like everything else about the UAW, that cash hoard 
exists not for the purpose of struggle, but rather to sustain the 
bloated salaries and expense accounts of the thousands of 
bureaucrats who run the union.

To add insult to injury, none of the union's millions will be used 
to cushion the financial hardship for the workers resulting from the 
loss of two days' pay, since strike benefits kick in only after 
eight days.

If ratified, the new four-year agreement will have catastrophic 
consequences for current and future auto workers, along with 
hundreds of thousands of retired workers and their dependents. As 
the Wall Street Journal noted, the deal "includes a historic 
restructuring of GM's obligations for UAW retiree health care and 
sets up a mechanism for GM to buy out many of its current workers 
and replace them with new employees at lower wages."

Thousands of older workers will be forced into retirement to be 
replaced by younger workers making half the traditional pay, with 
massively reduced benefits. The new union-controlled health care 
scheme will impose ever greater increases in out-of-pocket medical 
expenses on retirees, deplete resources from the pension fund, and 
lead to new wage and benefit cuts for current workers.

With the establishment of a retiree health care trust, known as a 
voluntary employee beneficiary trust, or VEBA, which GM and the 
other automakers will partially fund, the UAW will get its hands on 
one of the largest investment funds in the US-estimated to be worth 
$70 billion-and become, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, 
a "major financial player."

Gettelfinger and the other top UAW officials will become 
millionaires-at the direct expense of the jobs and living standards 
of the workers they nominally represent.

Contract terms

* Health care: The union has given up the right to employer-paid 
health care coverage for retirees, a gain won by UAW workers in 
1964. The introduction of the VEBA ends GM's legal and contractural 
obligation to provide such benefits to its more than 400,000 
retirees and their dependents.

>From the beginning the VEBA trust will be under-funded, with reports 
that GM will pay as little as $30 billion of the $51 billion it 
owes. The fate of retired workers and their families will depend 
entirely on investments made by the union in an increasingly 
unstable stock market. Any shortfalls in the fund will lead to 
skyrocketing co-pays and premiums, as UAW workers at Caterpillar and 
Detroit Diesel learned when their VEBA funds ran out of cash.

* Pensions: According to BusinessWeek magazine, the UAW gave GM a 
green light to raid the pension fund to pay for part of its 
contribution to the VEBA trust. This will endanger the future 
solvency of the pension fund and retirement benefits.

* Wages: The deal establishes a two-tier wage system that will 
include, according to the Wall Street Journal, "wage and benefit 
rates for some new hires that would probably be far less-maybe even 
half-the current wage-and-compensation package given to UAW-GM 
members." Wages for current non-assembly line workers (maintenance, 
janitorial) will also be cut.

Current workers will receive no wage increases for the life of the 
contract. Instead, the company will pay lump sum bonuses in the last 
three years of the four-year agreement. GM will also be able to 
negotiate a diversion of cost-of-living adjustments and increased 
cost-sharing of health care for active workers.

This represents the extension to the Big Three (GM, Ford and 
Chrysler) of the drastic wage-cutting carried out by auto parts 
giant Delphi, and the achievement of Wall Street's demand to put an 
end to the "middle class" auto worker.

* Jobs: The UAW claimed it called the strike to extract job security 
guarantees from GM. But the attempt to cast the contract as a boon 
to job security is an insult to the intelligence of auto workers. 
The agreement, according to all accounts, includes no job 
guarantees, but only empty promises that the company will consider 
investing new money in US plants.

GM will retain an absolutely free hand to continue downsizing and 
using the threat of plant closings and layoffs to wrench future give-
backs from the workers.

The transformation of the UAW into a business by means of the VEBA 
is the culmination of a protracted process of degeneration, in which 
the union has become increasingly antagonistic to the interests of 
the rank-and-file and ever more the instrument of a privileged 
bureaucracy that is unaccountable to the members.

This is not just a question of personal corruption (although 
corruption is rife within all layers of the union bureaucracy). It 
is rooted in the failure of the entire outlook and policy of not 
only the UAW, but of the official American labor movement as a whole.

The leaders of the industrial unions that emerged from the sit-down 
strikes pitched industrial battles of the 1930s, including the UAW, 
rejected the fight for a labor party and instead aligned the unions 
with the Democratic Party. This signified the subordination of the 
interests of the working class to America's ruling elite, and the 
abandonment of any struggle for universal, government-run social 
benefits, such as health care, as well as any struggle for 
industrial democracy. The UAW accepted the economic dictatorship 
exercised by American capital in every factory and at every job site.

This meant that the wages and benefits of auto workers were tied and 
subordinated to the profitability of the companies.

In the heyday of American industrial dominance-when six out of ten 
of the world's cars were being built by Detroit's automakers-the 
consequences of this betrayal were not apparent. But with the steep 
decline in the global economic position of US capitalism, which 
finds its sharpest expression in the decay of America's 
manufacturing base, the disastrous implications of the union's pro-
capitalist and nationalist policy are being felt by every auto 
worker. Today, all of the past conquests of generations of auto 
workers are being destroyed.

The UAW responded to the crisis of the US auto industry by 
renouncing any form of class struggle, suppressing the resistance of 
auto workers to plant closures and wage-cutting, and embracing a 
corporatist policy of union-management partnership. On this basis it 
has collaborated in the elimination of 600,000 union auto jobs since 
1978 and ever more brutal attacks on wages, benefits and working 
conditions.

The final nail in the coffin of not only US unions, but unions 
throughout the world, was the increasing globalization of 
production, which undermined all labor organizations based on a 
nationalist program of attempting to extract concessions from 
corporations within the framework of the national economy and the 
national labor market. From organizations that once pressured the 
companies for concessions to the workers, unions everywhere were 
transformed into organizations that pressure workers for concessions 
to management.

The central concern of the UAW bureaucracy over three decades of 
rapidly declining union membership, and the resulting contraction of 
its revenue stream from union dues, has been to secure its own 
interests even as it collaborated in the decimation of UAW jobs. By 
going into the health insurance business through its control of the 
massive VEBA trust fund, the UAW hopes to solve its problem. It has 
no problem sacrificing the jobs and living standards of UAW members 
to obtain the right to enrich itself.

The GM strike has highlighted the organic conflict between workers 
and the old, bureaucratized labor organizations. Its betrayal 
underscores the fact that workers cannot conduct any serious 
struggle without throwing off the dead weight of these organizations 
and developing a new political movement of the working class.

Such a movement must be independent of both parties of big business 
and base itself on a fundamentally different social principle: 
Economic life must be organized not to serve corporate profit and 
private wealth, but rather the needs of working people and society 
as a whole. It must be founded on the principles of social equality 
and genuine democracy-that is, on socialist principles.

The vast industries upon which modern society depends can no longer 
be the private domains of corporate executives and Wall Street 
speculators. The auto industry must be transformed into a public 
enterprise, democratically controlled by working people, to provide 
safe, affordable and environmentally sustainable transportation, and 
economic security for the producers.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/gmst-s27.shtml
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