DETROIT, MI., October 19 — While the International UAW leadership was drumming up support for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, they were also signing new four-year agreements with GM, Ford and Chrysler, the first since the federal bailout and bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009. These new contracts show that the “progressive” union leaders share the rulers’ vision of a low-wage, highly productive workforce that will keep the profits flowing from the GM Building to Wall St.
GM made more than $1 billion in profit last year and Ford about $4 billion. The new contracts continue the wage freeze of senior workers that began in 2005. Instead, there is a series of signing bonuses and lump-sum payments (as high as $16,000 to senior Ford workers, at least 50 percent less at GM and Chrysler) that do not go into our base pay or begin to make up the concessions taken from us. For new second-tier workers, base pay could rise by $4/hr. over the life of the Ford contract, but there is no bridge from the second tier to the first. There is no increase in the pension and the retirees’ Christmas bonus has been ended.
‘Improve Competitiveness’ on Workers’ Backs
John Fleming, Ford’s head of global manufacturing and labor affairs, said the new deal “will continue to improve our competitiveness...” Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the union tried to win bonuses and new jobs without creating additional costs.
In fact, overall labor costs could go down. GM and Ford are reopening a few plants and bringing more work to some others, promising as many as 12-15,000 new jobs, all at the lower-wage second tier. At the same time they are starting a new round of buyouts of senior workers. Now, second-tier workers are about 5% of the total workforce. By 2015 they could be as much as 20%. And in the industry as a whole, including the transnational assembly plants and the hundreds of supplier plants, probably two-thirds of the industry is at or below the GM, Ford and Chrysler second tier.
The UAW’s efforts to keep the Detroit Big Three “more competitive” has turned the U.S. into one of the low-wage, non-union centers of the international auto industry. And any promise of new jobs at any wage assumes the economy doesn’t crash again, taking the auto industry with it.
Forty Percent Say ‘No!’
The contracts are not going down easy with the workers. More than a third of the 40,000 GM workers voted to reject the deal and workers at the Ford Assembly and Stamping plants in Chicago turned the deal down by almost 80%. These are both older and newer workers whose communities have been ravaged by racist unemployment and cutbacks. They want to fight the rulers, not serve them.
Then the union hacks pressured the workers at two Kentucky plants to approve Ford’s new offer which resulted in overall ratification on October 18. Forty percent of the total vote rejected it.
The bosses and union leaders got their contracts this time, but as OWS and the high “No” vote indicate, the class struggle is heating up. This means a greater opening to win auto and other industrial workers to the revolutionary communist PLP. We will be up to the challenge.J