UAW Picket: No fair contract in a profit system

CHICAGO, October 7—Today members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) came out in force to support the ongoing United Auto Workers (UAW) strike here on the picket line at the Torrence Avenue Ford plant. We distributed dozens of copies of CHALLENGE and spoke with workers about the need for a communist revolution. Many workers are open to discussing these revolutionary ideas and thank us for our support in the struggle for a better contract.

During past contract "negotiations" the UAW agreed to a two-tier wage division, reduced or eliminated cost of living raises, eliminated pensions, and several other concessions so the auto industrialists could recover from an economic downturn around 2008. In other words, make the workers pay for the crisis of the bosses’ system! Capitalism makes it legal to exploit our labor. Labor is a commodity used by the capitalists to extract profits. When the workers are too old or too sick or injured due to speed ups, they are discarded like an old pair of shoes.

When we withhold our labor power in a strike, the bosses lose their profits. The workers’ struggle against the capitalists is a way to recover some of the stolen value that workers produce. The bosses enrich themselves and maintain the current system of oppression off that stolen value.

PLP is building a multiracial and international working-class movement against this capitalist system’s inherent racism, sexism, unemployment and war. Strengthening our ties with industrial workers – especially Black, Latin, Asian and women industrial workers – will be a crucial front in overthrowing the bosses’ exploitative system for good and building a new egalitarian communist society. Under communism, we will organize to produce and then distribute based on what our class needs, never profit.

Bosses will kill for their profits – Workers organize to fight back!
The Torrence Avenue Assembly Ford plant is the oldest continuously operated auto manufacturing plant and opened in 1924.  It has 4,600 workers and produces about twenty-four hundred cars a day.  These workers produce almost one fourth of all the Ford vehicles made in one year. This plant, and many other Ford plants scattered throughout the world have made the Ford family worth 2 billion dollars (Forbes, August 2023).  It's reported Ford’s CEO in 2022 was paid $21 million, and GM's CEO about $20 million per year.

In our conversations, auto workers related how a worker on the assembly line suffered a seizure. The line stopped, while another worker on the line came to help the worker with the seizure. A supervisor then reprimanded the worker for trying to help her co-worker, and before medical help was called, they replaced the worker and restarted the line, in that order. Profits come before the lives of workers, that is the lesson capitalism teaches us— that is why we fight for communism. Communism is a society where profits will be abolished, and workers’ lives and safety will always come first.

It was with the help and leadership of communist workers that the UAW was first established. In 1936-37 there was a sit-in strike in Flint, Michigan at the GM Fisher Body No. 1 plant that lasted 44 days.  The bosses hesitated to retake the plant because they feared millions of dollars’ worth of equipment would be destroyed by the occupying workers.  Right before the National Guard was to go in the plant, the bosses relented and recognized the UAW union.

But as history has shown us, after the current contract is settled, and the end of the next contract, workers will be back on the picket line to demand a fair contract, because the nature of the system is always to demand more from the workers. Trusting in liberal bosses like Joe Biden to get a “fair” deal is poison for our class, as not only did he help engineer the anti-worker bailout in 2008 he also torpedoed efforts for railroad workers to strike last year.

The bosses want more give-backs, so they can compete internationally against their rivals, mainly the bosses in China. They also want to give enough to workers to lay the groundwork for a patriotic population that is ready to fight and die for their imperialist wars. Capitalism is a never-ending treadmill, a deadly system of contradictions designed to wear us down. We must organize to smash it and replace it with workers' power and communism. Join us, join PLP!