JOLIET, IL, May 19 — About 800 Caterpillar (CAT) workers, members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) Local 851, struck at 12:01 a.m., May Day morning, after rejecting a proposed six-year contract that includes pay cuts and almost doubled healthcare costs. CAT made $1.5 billion in first-quarter profits.
“You can only bend people so much until they can’t take it anymore,” said one striker. “Put it this way,” said another. “Under their proposed contract, I wouldn’t be able to afford to take my kid to the doctor.”
CAT wants to determine starting wages for second-tier new hires on a “market-based” formula allowing the company to pay even less than the current $13/hour. CAT also wants to eliminate guaranteed healthcare for current retirees, key seniority provisions and put workers on unpredictable schedules with shifts that change every week.
Despite increasing profits by 44 percent over last year, CAT is stepping up attacks on its international work force. And while the workers have taken a bold a step by walking out, they should have no confidence in the pro-capitalist union leadership.
• In January, CAT locked out 465 members of the Canadian Auto Workers union at a locomotive facility in London, Ontario, after they refused to accept a 50 percent wage cut. CAT then closed the plant and moved the work to a non-union plant in Indiana.
• Last year, 840 IAM members at a Honeywell plant in Kansas City and almost 200 IAM union members at Manitowoc Cranes in Wisconsin struck against concessionary contracts. After a few weeks, both strikes collapsed in the face of scabs, and then strikers, crossing the picket lines.
Similar things could be happening here. It underlines the need for revolutionary communist leadership, with the goal of leading the workers to power to abolish wage slavery, as opposed to hanging on at any cost to keep the dues money rolling in.
The current International leadership is mainly concerned with making sure the bosses are profit-healthy and then, at best, hoping workers can “share” in the profits. These pro-capitalist union hacks are looking out for “their” country, “their” company and “their” factory, and then “their” workers. While it works for the bosses, it’s a dismal failure for the workers.
Red leadership would have shut CAT down internationally to keep the Ontario plant open. And while the whole U.S. labor movement has been focused on Wisconsin for two years, it did not defend the 200 Manitowoc Cranes strikers in that state, even as they gathered one million signatures to recall Governor Walker.
These union sellouts are marching the working class into the bosses’ electoral circus, away from sharpening the class struggle and supporting striking workers. We have our work cut out for us.