UAW Sells Out; Workers Fight Back

DETROIT, September 28 — “This is bullshit! It will take me another eight years to reach top pay!” That’s what one worker at Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant said of the tentative sellout agreement between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US (FCA) and 40,000 workers in the United Auto Workers (UAW). If what he says is true, top pay will be $25 an hour, a 15 percent cut from the current rate. The UAW leadership’s nationalist “Buy American” dogma and their strategy of partnering with the capitalist auto bosses has been a racist disaster for the mainly Black workers of Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Chicago and other cities. Thousands of Black families in Detroit are facing another wave of water shutoffs and foreclosures.
The local bosses’ plans to build new sports arenas for their own profit and entertainment wouldn’t be possible without the total collaboration of the UAW misleadership. Once upon a time, the UAW was a militant union organized by communists during the class wars of the 1930s. The great Flint sit-down strike of 1936-7 inspired workers throughout the world. Coinciding with the successes of the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union, Flint gave bosses worldwide good reason to tremble at the prospect of revolution. But over the decades, the old movement’s strategy of allying with lesser-evil bosses has turned unions like the UAW into powerful enemies of the working class.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is picking up the red flag where the heroic workers of Detroit once raised it. We are fighting for what bosses fear most: communist revolution.
With “Friends” Like These…
Having given away the store, UAW President Dennis Williams was promising hourly pay raises for longtime workers who haven’t seen one in a decade. He also said the union would “bridge the gap” for second-tier workers hired after 2007, who now start at about half the pay of first-tier workers. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne had another idea for how to end the two-tier system: by lowering wages for top-tier workers!
Today, 45 percent of FCA-UAW members make entry-level wages of about $17 per hour. Over the last two labor contracts negotiated by the UAW, FCA workers have seen their wages drop as much as $30 per hour. These givebacks by workers’ false friends in the UAW and the Democratic Party have lowered their pay to the level of non-union workers at Toyota and Honda in the U.S. South. Now, in the name of moving production back to the U.S. from Mexico, these class traitors are pushing more wage-cutting contracts.
After decades of being battered by its international competition, culminating in the 2007 bankruptcies of GM and what was then Chrysler, the U.S. auto industry has undergone drastic changes. So has the UAW, which has chosen to ally with U.S. auto bosses instead of the international working class.
Counting the foreign-owned “transplants” and the massive parts supplier industry (which used to be mostly in-house at the Big Three auto makers), there could be more than 700,000 auto workers in the U.S. But the vast majority of the industry, including temporary and part-time workers, is non-union, and wages outside the core assembly plants have collapsed. The parts supplier industry has workers making as little as $9 per hour, even as they toil for luxury auto makers from Cadillac to Mercedes.
Thousands of workers may be voting this contract down. Workers have rejected it at Jefferson North, Sterling Stamping, Trenton Engine, Kokomo Casting, and Toledo Machining. No matter what the final count, this antiracist rebellion by the rank-and-file against the UAW leadership is a welcome development.
Same Enemy, Same Fight!
The attack on autoworkers is worldwide. On September 10, 4,300 Ford workers in Sao Bernardo de Campo, the industrial region around Sao Paulo, Brazil, went on strike against mass layoffs and pay cuts. The strike concluded with a deal to cut workers’ hours by 20 percent! Workers in Brazil at Fiat, Volvo, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen and truck manufacturer Iveco have faced thousands of layoffs and forced time off without pay.  
The ruling Workers’ Party, Brazil’s version of the U.S. Democratic Party, has been busy slashing workers’ wages and pay in response to what they call the “economic crisis.” Meanwhile, these bosses are rolling out a red carpet of tax breaks and blank checks to builders of giant stadiums and luxury hotels for the 2016 Olympic Games. The workers of Brazil gave $15 billion to the capitalists to pay for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, sponsored by Ford and Fiat—a disaster for the working class. Now the workers in Detroit, like their sisters and brothers in Brazil, are shouldering the costs of new professional sports stadiums there.
Unlike the UAW or Brazil’s anti-Workers’ Party leaders, the Progressive Labor Party isn’t trying to bail out the bosses; we’re fighting to destroy them with communist revolution. We’re not pushing two-tier wage contracts; we’re fighting to abolish wage slavery.
PLP salutes the militancy of industrial workers fighting back in São Paulo and Detroit! Over the past three years, tens of thousands of autoworkers in Brazil, Mexico, China, South Africa, and Turkey have staged bitter strikes. Their unions cut deals to keep the assembly lines churning out profits for the capitalists. As the 1937 Flint strike showed, industrial workers are at the center of capitalism’s profit engine. They will play a key role in communist revolution. United with the international revolutionary communist PLP, we can build a world run by the working class. PL’ers and friends should call on their local unions to organize actions of solidarity with auto workers from Detroit to Brazil. Our aim is to build an international PLP that can smash this racist, imperialist system once and for all.