Many of the cars that General Motors says it will cease producing were hailed as major break-throughs when introduced. The high-priced Chevy Volt, which initially benefited from enormous government subsidies intended to promote electric vehicles, and the more modestly-priced Chevy Cruze, however, both were sales disappointments. Both were derisively called “Obamamobiles” by some critics, based on the support the Obama administration through behind them.
Industry publication boasts: GM plant closures aimed at extorting more concessions from autoworkers
In its coverage of the General Motors plant closure
announcement, the has stressed that one of the central aims
of the job massacre is to intimidate 140,000 GM, Ford and
Fiat Chrysler workers whose contracts are expiring next
summer and break their determination to win significant
improvements in wages and working conditions from the
highly profitable automakers.
This has been confirmed by the chief industry publication Automotive News in an article published Thursday, headlined, "GM sends bold message to UAW with potential plant closures." In the article, Automotive News reporter Michael Wayland acknowledges that GM made the announcement, carefully timed to precede the start of negotiations, not only to undermine workers’ aspirations, but to soften them up for the imposition of even deeper concessions in the next labor agreements.
"While the negotiations don't officially kick off until next year, both sides have assembled their bargaining teams, and members are discussing what to focus on during the talks. As always, many UAW members want more: more raises, more profit-sharing, more everything," Wayland complains.
By announcing that no new products would be allocated to the Detroit-Hamtramck, Lordstown, Ohio and Oshawa, Ontario assembly plants, he boasts, "GM is managing UAW members’ expectations" and "changing the narrative from members wanting more to potentially just wanting to save jobs and plants."
He quotes Kristin Dziczek of the corporate think tank Center for Automotive Research, who adds, "These are real stakes in front of the bargaining team next year for the negotiations. It might actually help the membership focus on jobs and survival more than getting more, more and more in terms of raises, benefits and bonuses."
Like the Mafia, the corporate executives are using the threat of plant closings, which would destroy tens of thousands of direct and related jobs and decimate entire communities, as a gun pointed at the heads of workers. Either they accept less pay, fewer benefits and conditions of industrial slavery or the workers and their families will starve.
This "bold message" is directed at rank-and-file workers, not the UAW or the Unifor union in Canada, which are co-conspirators in this extortion racket. Wayland expresses the hope of the auto bosses that the threatened shutdowns might help the UAW reassert its control over rebellious workers who see the union as nothing more than a corrupt tool of management.
GM’s announcement, he says, "could actually be a blessing in disguise for UAW leaders, who are fighting an internal battle with members following a federal corruption scandal. If union leaders can save one, maybe two plants, they could be seen as heroes instead of company pawns, a view of several recent UAW leaders painted by federal prosecutors."
Any deal the UAW signs to keep a factory open, however, will come at a huge cost to workers. Wayland writes. "If any of the plants are saved, union members should read the fine print in the contract. Expect GM to demand untraditional employment practices such as an increase in temporary, subcontracted or outsourced workers."
"The UAW already opened the door for the practice at Orion Assembly in suburban Detroit with an Autonomous Vehicle Memorandum of Understanding that allows the automaker to offer reduced wages and benefits for some jobs," Wayland writes. This is a reference to the secret deal signed by then UAW Vice President for GM Cindy Estrada that allowed GM to contract work out to its wholly owned subsidiary GM Subsystems, which pays vastly lower wages.
Wayland continues: "The reality is GM has too many plants, legacy costs that remain unacceptable, and it doesn't see crunching metal as a long-term opportunity for growth and profits. The company likely wants to close the plants but could be persuaded to change its mind under the right circumstances."
He concludes, "Collective bargaining between the UAW and Detroit automakers is a theatrical chess match. GM just raised the curtain with a bold move that sets the stage for the next year of negotiations."
Indeed, the contract "negotiations" are a well-orchestrated play where the performers pretend to represent antagonistic parties when in fact both the corporations and their bribed union "partners" are on the same side and workers are across the barricades on the other.
For the past 40 years, the UAW and its Canadian counterparts have asserted again and again that concessions were necessary to defend jobs. The companies, for their part, pocketed workers' givebacks and carried out mass layoffs and plant closings regardless.
It should be recalled that in the 2015 contract talks workers were overwhelmingly determined to win substantial wage increases after a seven-year freeze, restore the eight-hour day and abolish the hated two-tier wage and benefit system imposed in 2007 and expanded under Obama’s 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler. On the eve of the opening of talks, Ford announced it was shifting production of its Focus compact and C-Max hybrid and plug-in models to Mexico after 2018, threatening the jobs of more than 4,000 workers at its Michigan Assembly Plant in the Detroit suburb of Wayne.
When the UAW came back with a contract that maintained the two-tier system and other concessions, including a proposal to shift current workers onto a union-run health care program, Fiat Chrysler workers rebelled, voting down the contract by a 2-to-1 margin in the first defeat of a UAW-backed national contract in three decades. The UAW was able to ram through a slightly refurbished deal and similar ones at GM and Ford only by resorting to lies and threats of more plant closures and layoffs amid allegations by workers of outright vote-rigging.
After relying on the UAW to do its dirty work, the auto executives boasted to Wall Street that the 2015 contracts kept labor cost increases below the rate of inflation and would facilitate the layoff of workers by vastly increasing the number of temporary part-time workers, who could be fired at will with no cost to the employer. The UAW also signed separate “competitive” agreements that included a third and fourth tier of lower-paid workers, supposedly to keep several GM and Ford facilities open.
The Automotive News article is a statement right out of the horse’s mouth. The auto executives and the Wall Street financiers have no intention of granting the slightest concessions to workers even though the ruling class is choking on billions in profits. On the contrary, the corporate and financial oligarchy is reacting to the growth of strikes and mass protests against social inequality in the US and around the world by doubling down.
The GM plant closings must be fought. This struggle must be guided by the principle that a good-paying and secure job is non-negotiable and must be a social right guaranteed to all.
This fight will not be carried out by the corporate stooges in the UAW. Nor will the struggle be advanced by making fruitless appeals to Trump or the Democrats, who, despite their phony protests, defend the capitalist system and insist that the corporations have the right to throw workers onto the streets to defend their profits. The unions and the big business politicians want American and Canadian workers to blame workers in Mexico and China for this threat, not the capitalist owners.
If there is to be a struggle, and there must be, then it must be carried out by workers themselves. New organizations of struggle, factory and workplace committees, must be built that are independent of the corrupt unions and democratically controlled by rank-and-file workers themselves. These committees should link up workers across the targeted factories and the entire auto and auto parts industry throughout the US, Canada and other countries. They must unite with workers and young people in Detroit, the cities around the Lordstown plant, and in Oshawa, Ontario to fight.
As the brutal actions of GM make clear, this is a class struggle, a war between two irreconcilably opposed classes. The capitalist exploiters have thrown down the gauntlet. Now it is time for the working class to fight.
EYE ON THE NEWS
Growth for Whose Sake?
There’s more to life than rising consumption.
November 26, 2018
Economy, finance, and budgets
Should economic growth be policymakers’ top priority? In The Once and Future Worker, published earlier this month, I argue no. Growth is important, to be sure, and rising material living standards depend on it. But I propose what I call the
Working Hypothesis: that a labor market in which
workers can support strong families and
communities is the central determinant of long-
term prosperity, and should be the central focus of
public policy. “While growth is necessary to a
prosperous society,” I write, “it is not sufficient.
Not all growth is equally beneficial, and the
policy choices that yield the most immediate
short-term growth don’t necessarily prepare the
ground for sustained economic and social
progress.”
Michael Strain and Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute have taken offense to this suggestion, and have launched a series of heated rebuttals in defense of the honor of economic growth. “The only thing [the book] really demonstrates is that it’s devilishly difficult to make sense out of nonsense,”
writes Pethokoukis. “And trying to do so forces one to embrace the absurd.” They accuse the book of being “
anti-globalization,” though the first sentence of its chapter on globalization observes that “practical objections to ‘globalization’ tend to be quite narrow.” The book, again, purportedly “
downplay[s] growth,” though its discussion of how best to understand prosperity emphasizes that “this isn’t to say that economic growth isn’t important; of course it is.”
These critics are fighting the last war, without showing a clear sense of where the current dispute lies. Both men insist repeatedly that growth leads to rising material living standards, especially when paired with rising redistribution, a point no one is questioning here. This is the classic idea of the “economic pie,” which policymakers seek to expand so that everyone can have a bigger slice. The Once and Future Worker’s core argument is that while this view—which I call Economic Piety—is self-evidently correct on its own terms, it is incorrect in the unstated assumption that present consumer welfare is the correct measure of prosperity.
Rather, I contend, work matters. People’s well-being is more closely tied to their productive capacity, and their commensurate ability to support their families and contribute to their communities, than it is to their level of consumption. Further, growth is itself an emergent property of a healthy society; insofar as the goal is to maximize long-term growth, all segments of society must remain engaged in a broad-based economy. We should not simply adopt the policies that appear most growth-friendly at a given moment in time, because ensuring wide participation in economic productivity is foundational to a healthy society, not a nice-to-have byproduct.
So when Strain and Pethokoukis affirm their correctness from within their own consumption-maximizing perspective, they miss the point. They repeatedly attribute positions to the book that it does not take, avoid quoting from it, criticize none of its actual policy proposals, and fail even to acknowledge the existence of the question whether Economic Piety or the Working Hypothesis offers a better way to understand prosperity. Compare Pethokoukis’s claim that I argue “globalization has brought only stagnant living standards” for the non-“elite” with the book’s text: “we got exactly what we thought we wanted: strong overall economic growth and a large GDP, rising material living standards…” But as the book’s next sentence notes, “we gave up something we took for granted: a labor market in which the nation’s diverse array of families and communities could support themselves.”
Focusing on concrete points of disagreement might help us avoid talking past each other. How, for example, should we understand the present condition of the American working class—roughly, those who have not earned a college degree? If our standard is material consumption, they have never been better off: virtually all of them have microwave ovens, mobile phones, and other consumer products. If our standard is supporting their families and communities through productive work, however, the past decade has been the worst of the post-war era. So, is the working class thriving or not? I think the evidence points clearly toward a crisis. The working class is beset by withdrawal from the labor force, family collapse, rising dependence on government programs, skyrocketing substance abuse and suicide rates, and declining life expectancy. On what basis should we say things are going well?
Second, is all growth of equal value? An aggregate measure of GDP or productivity obscures the question of who is producing or becoming more productive. If the least productive 20 percent of a nation’s workers drop out of the labor force entirely, but the most productive 20 percent double their productivity, GDP will be higher. Is the nation better off? I would say no. Do my critics disagree?
Regarding globalization, Strain and Pethokoukis take particular issue with my suggestion that trade and immigration may not be always beneficial. My view is that they can be beneficial, but balance matters. An international market in which America imports $50 billion of cars from Japan and sends back $50 billion of airplanes is healthy. But if we send back $50 billion of IOUs (i.e., Treasury bonds) instead, American workers lose and the American economy suffers. Do my critics see these transactions as comparable, and voice no preference between them? Likewise, immigrants bring many positive assets to America, but adding unskilled workers to a labor market struggling to accommodate those already here is a mistake. Do Strain and Pethokoukis believe high levels of unskilled immigration have been and will continue to be superior to a skills-based system, either for American workers, or our long-run economic growth?
Obviously, there is much to discuss. I hope Strain and Pethokoukis will answer these questions and perhaps pose some of their own, but that in doing so they will take the time to understand what The Once and Future Worker actually says, and how it differs from their own views.
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