About 13,000 GM, Ford and Stellantis workers are on strike in what is being called “the first strike against all the ‘Big 3’” and “the biggest auto strike in decades.” Yet, as of this writing, only 10 percent of the workers are striking and 90 percent are working with no contract (the expired contract was not extended).
Against the backdrop of 100,000 striking TV and screenwriters and actors in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, a spike in strikes and organizing around the U.S., the mood of the workers is changing. After the “summer of strikes,” the pro-capitalist union leaders and politicians have a tiger by the tail! In the recent contract struggles involving 120,000 railroad workers and 350,000 UPS workers, Biden and the union leaders were able to kill the strikes before they happened! Workers are not yet able to break away from the liberal politicians and union misleaders.
Joe Biden, who calls himself, “the most pro-union President ever,” was one of the architects of the 2008 bailout that reaped $250 billion in profits for the auto bosses while auto workers saw their real wages drop by 20 percent. These concessions helped GM, Ford, and Stellantis pocket $250 billion in profits over the past decade, with the three CEOs increasing their pay by 40 percent, with each one now making between $25-$29 million annually (Economics Policy Institute).
Biden recently forced a national contract on railroad workers that they had overwhelmingly rejected, and he quickly dispatched Labor Secretary Julie Su to Detroit to resolve the strike, reflecting the larger issues at stake. One, is the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). Another is winning a loyal industrial workforce as the U.S. escalates the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and prepares for a possible conflict with China.
The strike comes as the bosses are investing billions to develop EVs while facing stiff competition from Tesla and international challengers. China is the #1 producer of EVs in the world and Hyundai will soon build electric vehicles at a new factory in Georgia. John Casesa, who previously headed strategy at Ford said, “The transition to EVs is dominating every bit of this discussion.” (NYT, 9/16).
The transition from gasoline engines to EVs could affect millions of jobs as traditional auto plants that produce engines, mufflers, catalytic converters, fuel injectors and other components will be retooled or shut down. One of the main goals of the UAW is to get the auto bosses to agree to have the new battery and EV factories, many of them joint ventures with smaller companies, covered by the national labor contract. The union also wants to regain the right to strike over plant shutdowns.
The new “reform” leadership of the UAW, elected by an unenthusiastic 10 percent of the membership, has got a laundry list of demands they have no intention of winning, including a 40 percent wage hike, a shorter work week, and abolishing the multi-tiered wage system. They say they want to reverse concessions that they and the old leadership gave up over the past decades in order to keep the auto bosses competitive with their international rivals. The auto companies have proposed a 20 percent wage hike over four years.
In 2019, the UAW led a 40-day strike at GM while the International President and a slew of national officers were either under federal investigation or on their way to prison for bribery and other corruption charges. Then as now, the strike is at least in part, an attempt to consolidate the membership around the leadership.
For our members and friends of Progressive Labor Party, the main lesson of this current upsurge is that we must not let this moment pass us by. We are watching too many of these class battles unfold from the outside. That must change. We are calling on more comrades and readers of CHALLENGE to get jobs in auto and Amazon, at UPS and in mass transit, so that we are better positioned to fight for the political leadership of the workers. At its core, this fight is reform vs. revolution.
As Marx pointed out in “Value, Price and Profit,” we cannot restrict ourselves to fighting over contracts and grievances, to what he called the “unavoidable guerilla fights,” that spring up from the ongoing class war. “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!’ [we] ought to inscribe on [our] banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolish the wage system!’”