Dozens of workers on all shifts of a major truck assembly plant in the South fought changes to the paid-time-off (PTO) policy the bosses suddenly imposed. The changes set up hundreds for possible firing for calling in sick too often. The most threatened workers were Latino single parents with children who need to use more sick time. This means the change is both racist and sexist and sets up all workers for attack.
Under the old policy, all write-ups for absences were cleared every 90 days, but if you had four write-ups you could be fired. Under the new policy only one write-up is cleared every 90 days.
The bosses need these changes because each country’s auto companies — Toyota, Ford, GM, in Korea, Europe, Russia and China — are desperate to squeeze high enough profits from their workers in order to survive against their competitors in their inter-imperialist rivalry. The stakes are high and will ultimately lead to larger wars.
When the new PTO policy was announced, word spread that the bosses were requiring all workers to sign a form acknowledging the changes. Workers were given no notice. The bosses demanded that workers sign the new policy without reading it.
Many workers realized the problem. PLP members and friends analyzed the small print, calling on all workers to refuse to sign. Dozens of workers, separately and in groups, confronted supervisors who demanded signatures. Several workers faced down supervisors who threatened firing for not signing. These supervisors feared getting in trouble if they couldn’t make the workers sign.
Talk began among groups of workers about having meetings, shutting down the line, walking out or petitioning against the new policy. However they’re working 10-hour shifts, six days a week and workers couldn’t meet to co-ordinate any planning. The bosses were showing their increasing weakness in the world-wide battle for auto profits by imposing overtime alongside this new policy, enabling them to fire more workers whenever necessary. But the working class is not organized to understand, and take advantage of, the bosses’ desperation.
After worker confrontations with “Human Resources” management, the bosses quietly backed off a notch by clearing all existing absences before the new policy took effect — or so they claimed. “If it’s true,” said one worker, “where’s the proof? We should see it and sign something.” Nonetheless, it’s a small victory, because currently no one is on the brink of being fired for their next absence. But the bosses are also making it much harder to get time off approved.
PL’ers and others couldn’t pull off any action beyond individual confrontations and shouting matches with supervisors. These confrontations were good, but bigger action will be necessary. Workers must see these reform struggles as training exercises on the road to revolution, workers’ power and control of the entire world by the working class.
Even strikes and major battles against the capitalist rulers, whether in the U.S., Japan, Egypt or other countries, can at best win temporary gains in this period of rapidly-increasing inter-imperialist rivalry and world economic crisis.
The desperation of bosses locked in this rivalry means they and their capitalist system are weaker, not stronger, because when each company squeezes its workers harder, workers can learn that the bosses’ system of profit, greed and war doesn’t work and need not be ever-lasting. The workers can learn that the capitalist class and its governments can be taken by a working class organized to go all the way, and turn the struggle into a working-class revolution to establish communism — a world without money, racism or exploitative wage systems — all provided if PLP points the way.
The key is consistently building political struggle and personal relationships, day in and day out. There’s no way workers can protect their jobs in this plant, no less prepare for revolution, without PLP and its friends organizing secret workers’ meetings to analyze the constant attacks, identify the most important issues and recognize the limits of reform actions. Attacks and firings should be expected. Workers’ meetings should plan actions necessary to save those jobs as larger struggles unfold.
All this is risky, but the alternative is riskier, to surrender to every bosses’ attack instead of recognizing and exploiting the capitalists’ increasing weaknesses. Giving in is no answer at all, because factory work in the South is already at slave-labor levels.
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