THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
UAW UNION CORRUPTION - VICE PRESIDENT OF PONDSCUM NORWOOD JEWELL INDICTED
CRONY CAPITALISM
Barack
Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history,
and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special
interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting
handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small
businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter
Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White
House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering
corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate
America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s OBAMANOMICS TO
SERVE THE RICH AND GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.
Union Workers Stand with Trump: ‘Don’t Let GM Off the Hook’ for Plant Closures
Protestors against the decision to close a Chevrolet Cruze plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Photo: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
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The United Auto Workers (UAW) — which represents thousands of American workers at General Motors (GM) — is standing with President Trump in his recent call for GM CEO Mary Barra to reopen the corporation’s idled Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant.
This week, Trump called on Barra to reopen the recently closed GM Lordstown assembly plant. The closing of the plant resulted in the immediate layoff of about 1,600 American workers and since 2017, about 4,500 American workers in Ohio have lost their jobs at GM.
“Just spoke to Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors about the Lordstown Ohio plant,” Trump said in a tweet this week. “I am not happy that it is closed when everything else in our Country is BOOMING. I asked her to sell it or do something quickly. She blamed the UAW Union — I don’t care, I just want it open!”
In response, the UAW is standing with Trump, asking that the populist president be involved in negotiations between GM executives and the union workers to get the assembly plant reopened — a move that would save the Lordstown area and surrounding communities from economic decline.
UAW officials wrote on Twitter a “Thank you” to Trump for standing with the laid-off American workers in Lordstown, and wrote that “Corporations close plants, workers don’t” in response to claims from Barra that the plant was idled because of union workers.
So-called “industry experts” have blasted Trump and the UAW’s effort to include the president in negotiations to reopen the Lordstown plant, arguing to the Detroit Free Pressthat GM executives will not be pushed into a decision.
“This is an industry with very long planning horizons at huge scales of investment and production,” said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of Industry, Labor & Economics at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor. “It’s economically significant and important to the country. But GM can’t be bullied into making decisions that aren’t good business decisions.” [Emphasis added]
…
“Neither one of the parties negotiates in public or in the press. This is a two-party negotiation and even the investments, which do involve states and local incentives, they’re not at the bargaining table,” said Dziczek. “This is all about what the union and GM agree on.” [Emphasis added]
GM executives and the UAW are supposed to begin negotiations on possibilities for the Lordstown plant this September, but Trump wrote online that he wants immediate action from GM.
This year, GM announced it would stop production at four of its U.S. plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland. Trump initially blasted the decision, saying, “This country has done a lot for General Motors. They better get back to Ohio and soon.”
While GM closed its Lordstown plant this month, the multinational corporation’s Mexico production has remained unaffected by layoffs, and production in China has ramped up.
The Lordstown plant closure, a new analysis finds, will have a devastating impact on the working and middle-class communities in the small, Ohio region. Between the plant closure and American jobs in supporting industries around the area, about 8,000 U.S. workers in the Lordstown area are expected to lose their jobs because of GM’s decision.
Lordstown’s economic downturn from the plant closure would come as Barra continues raking in an annual salary of about $22 million and GM profits about $11 billion before taxes.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
More Than 8K U.S. Workers May Be Laid Off Due to Ohio GM Plant Closure
More than 8,000 American workers in the Lordstown, Ohio, region could be laid off due to General Motors’ (GM) decision to close its assembly plant in the town.
This year, GM CEO Mary Barra announced the automaker would stop production at four of its U.S. plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland.
The production closures come after GM laid off about 1,500 American workers in Lordstown in 2018, while its Mexico production remains unaffected, and production in China ramps up.
Since 2017, about 4,500 American workers have lost their jobs at GM in Ohio, and 1,600 specifically were laid off with the recent closing of the Lordstown plant. Another 900 American workers in supporting industries have also already been put out of work. In Michigan and Maryland, thousands of American workers are expected to be laid off this year.
Newest job loss estimates reveal a startling economic downturn that the GM plant closure could have on the working and middle-class communities in and around Lordstown.
Tod Porter, chair of the Youngstown State University Economics Department, now projects that more than 8,000 American workers in the Lordstown area could lose their jobs due to the GM plant closure. A number of these job losses may be at auto supply companies that relied on the auto manufacturing plant.
A couple of GM workers explained to Reuters how they have had to move multiple times across the country to keep their job at the automaker, an inconvenience that has weighed heavily on their personal lives:
[Dina] Mays is on her third GM factory in 15 years. In 2005, she moved to Lordstown in northeastern Ohio after being laid off at a GM plant in Baltimore, Maryland. [Emphasis added]
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It’s rough,” Mays said. [Emphasis added]
…
With 25 years at GM, [Joe Stanton] also has five years to go before he can retire. He rents an apartment with Mays just outside Toledo to cut costs. He moved from Pittsburgh to Lordstown in 2006 when his GM plant there closed. He owns two homes, one near Lordstown and one in Pennsylvania. [Emphasis added]
As has been seen with other working and middle-class American communities, outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. manufacturing industries and jobs to cut labor costs for corporate executives have devastated entire regions of the country.
Weirton, West Virginia, for example, once boomed with 15,000 residents employed at steel mills. Free trade and outsourcing in the 1990s spurred mass layoffs in the American steel industry, leaving just 800 workers in the town still employed at steel mills.
American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy as every one manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries. Decades of free trade, with deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has eliminated nearly five million manufacturing jobs from the American economy and resulted in the closure of nearly 50,000 manufacturing plants.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
UAW corruption scandal expands to Vice President Norwood Jewell, who rammed through 2015 sellout
19 March 2019
Norwood Jewell, who led the United Auto Workers (UAW) contract negotiations with Fiat Chrysler (FCA) in 2015, was indicted by federal prosecutors Monday for taking tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from FCA executives.
Jewell is the highest UAW executive indicted so far in the ongoing federal investigation of the corruption scheme, which involved paying millions of dollars to UAW officials to sign and enforce pro-company contracts that gutted the jobs, wages and conditions of autoworkers. Four other UAW officials have pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the corruption probe.
The indictment completely exposes the earlier claims by former UAW president Dennis Williams that the corruption scandal was unrelated to the “collective bargaining agreements” rammed through by the UAW in 2015 over mass opposition.
The indictment of Jewell proves that the 2015 contracts are illegitimate and must be declared null and void. On what legal basis can a contract negotiated by individuals receiving bribes from the companies be considered valid and binding?
The corruption scandal is an exposure not only of Jewell, but of the UAW itself and all of the official trade unions, which serve as instruments of corporate management and the state. It underscores the urgent need for autoworkers and all workers to form independent organizations of struggle, rank-and-file factory committees, to prepare and plan a fight back.
Involved in the corruption scandal is not just one contract. Jewell’s predecessor as head of the UAW's Chrysler Department, General Holiefield, and Holiefield's wife were the first to be indicted for taking bribes between 2007 and 2011. The bribes were designed, as one FCA executive put it, to keep union officials “fat, dumb and happy.” The deals Holiefield negotiated, including during Obama’s restructuring of Chrysler and GM in 2009, established the hated two-tier wage system, abolished the eight-hour day, stripped retirees of health benefits and destroyed other gains.
Jewell, the indictment states, “knowingly joined the conspiracy whereby officers and employees of the UAW would willfully request, receive, and accept things of value worth over $40,000 from persons acting in the interest of FCA,” including “travel, lodging and meals.”
The conduit for these payments was the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center (NTC), which received between $13 million and $31 million in company funds every year between 2009 and 2015, prosecutors say.
According to the indictment, Jewell used training center credit cards to pay for one meal costing $7,569 at LG’s Prime Steak House in Palm Springs, California, along with more than $8,000 in expenses at Indian Canyons Golf Resort in Palm Springs. He also authorized other UAW officials to spend over $43,370 at Palm Springs and Detroit restaurants. Jewell charged “tens of thousands” more for parties at the joint center in the suburban Detroit city of Warren in 2014 and 2015.
In previous court filings, Jewell, who abruptly retired shortly after his home was searched by federal investigators in late 2017, has been identified as “UAW-3.” While “UAW-2” and “UAW-1” are not named in the indictment, the noose is tightening at the very top of the organization. Potential targets include former president Dennis Williams, UAW-GM officials Joe Ashton and Cindy Estrada, and current UAW chief Gary Jones.
What is revealed in the scandal is not merely the personal corruption of highly paid executives, but rather the nature of the UAW itself, which is engaged in a systematic conspiracy against the working class. Corrupt interactions between the company and UAW officials are so natural because the two are on the same side. The UAW is not a workers’ organization, but a corrupt tool of corporate management, a cheap labor contractor and industrial police force.
The present character of the UAW is the product of a protracted process. Incapable of responding in any progressive fashion to the decline of US industry and the globalization of production, the nationalist and pro-capitalist UAW abandoned any resistance to the auto corporations and, in the name of “fighting foreign competition,” became a partner of the companies in increasing the exploitation of autoworkers.
The joint training programs were first established in the early 1980s, when the UAW officially rejected the class struggle and adopted the corporatist program of “labor-management partnership” as its guiding principle.
As early as 1984, the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, warned that the policy of union-management collaboration outlined in the 1984 contract would “go a long way towards transforming the UAW into a company union.” The statement, “Corporatism and the Trade Unions,” continued: “The policy of the bureaucracy is corporatism—that is, a doctrine of the identity of interests of labor and management, which leads to the unlimited collaboration between bureaucrats and the capitalist state to defend the profit system, no matter how severe the consequences for the working class.”
Over the last four decades, while UAW membership fell from 1.5 million to a little more than 430,000 since 1979, and workers were forced to take endless wage and benefit cuts, the assets of the UAW and its various businesses, including the retiree health care trust, have grown to many billions of dollars.
In 2015, autoworkers rebelled against the UAW, with Fiat Chrysler workers initially rejecting by a two-to-one margin the contract pushed by the hated Jewell. The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter emerged as the center of opposition in 2015, prompting UAW officials to denounce the newsletter as an “outside agitator” spreading “fake news.” The final sellout deal at FCA and the other companies was rammed through with a combination of threats and outright fraud.
Workers know the UAW is preparing another sellout as this summer’s contract battle for 150,000 GM, Ford and FCA workers approaches. That is why workers must begin now to build rank-and-file factory committees to prepare a struggle against the corporate-UAW conspiracy.
In opposition to the anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese nationalism of the UAW, autoworkers must fight for the unity of workers throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. The attack on jobs by GM and Ford is part of a global restructuring of the auto industry, which demands a global response by workers. The revolt by auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico demonstrates that these workers are not the enemies, but the class brothers of US and Canadian autoworkers.
In preparing a counteroffensive by autoworkers, a warning must be made. The Justice Department is not pursuing this case to strengthen workers against the auto companies. On the contrary, fearing a revolt against the UAW, the Trump administration may be considering a federal takeover of the UAW or some other means, including binding arbitration, to tie the hands of autoworkers. Trump has already called for the immediate reopening of the contracts to convince GM to reopen the Lordstown, Ohio plant or sell it to a new owner. This proposal, which would entail massive wage and benefit cuts, has been hailed by the UAW.
Rank-and-file autoworkers must stake out their own independent position. An industrial counteroffensive aimed at uniting autoworkers with all other sections of workers must be combined with a political counteroffensive independent of both corporate-controlled parties. This means fighting for a socialist program, including the transformation of the auto giants and banks into public enterprises collectively owned and democratically controlled by workers, run on the basis of social need, not private profit.
“Think of how many lives and families were ruined”
Autoworkers react to new UAW corruption charges
On Monday, federal prosecutors in Detroit charged former United Auto Workers Vice President Norwood Jewell with conspiring to violate the Labor Management Relations Act in connection with the sprawling investigation into the bribing of UAW officials by Fiat Chrysler (FCA) executives. To date, four other UAW officials and three company executives, including the former head of labor relations, have pleaded guilty in the corruption scandal.
The charges are the latest in a multi-year investigation into illegal payments funneled by corporate executives to union officials for the purpose of securing “company-friendly agreements,” i.e., ramming through concessions contracts over rank-and-file opposition. Jewell headed the UAW Chrysler Department from 2014 to 2016 and was the chief union negotiator for the 2015 national contract. He is the highest-level UAW official to have been charged thus far.
Norwood Jewell, left, at opening of 2015 contract UAW-Fiat Chrysler talks (Credit: uaw-chrysler.com)
Workers contacted by the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter on Monday expressed bitterness, disgust and outrage. The indictment of Jewell confirmed their long-held suspicions about the corruption of UAW officials and increased their determination to reverse the losses imposed over many years by the union.
A worker for Chrysler’s Mopar parts department in Georgia told the Autoworker Newsletter that the 2015 contracts “should be considered null and void.” He added, “There is no way they can keep defending them now.
“Think of how many lives and families were ruined behind those unethical negotiations! We should wildcat just off of this. I wish there was some type of mass walkout.
“I knew this day was coming sooner or later. It is a slap in the face of countless members from the early years who gave their lives for the betterment of workers.”
“Norwood Jewell looked us in the face and ferociously defended that the contract was negotiated in good faith,” he continued. “We all know now that this was a lie. The UAW and their duplicitous nature are on borrowed time! Workers all over the world are at our wits end!”
A worker at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Michigan wrote in an email: “I think Jewell should have gone to jail and every single person that was involved.”
A worker at FCA’s Belvidere Assembly Plant in northern Illinois said that workers “want our money that we were robbed of, especially since the former UAW president [Dennis Williams] has not been charged and sits in his non-union-built Black Lake home with his expensive whiskeys. We wonder why he isn’t being held accountable for it happening under his watch.”
Last month, FCA announced the elimination of an entire shift at the Belvidere plant and the layoff of nearly 1,400 workers, about which the UAW has remained criminally silent. The layoffs will have a domino effect on jobs at parts suppliers and other dependent industries throughout the economically depressed Rockford area.
The worker said he thought the UAW had known about the job cuts in advance. “It’s all about money, corporate profits and taking care of the shareholders at the expense of the workers. It’s a contract year, so yeah, they play these games with us. We at BAP get this every contract year, where they’ll dangle a car coming to us if they get what they want. We get a short-lived job security guarantee while workers take concessions.”
Speaking of the coming contract negotiations, he said, “Tier two employees want the same pay as tier one, the same 401k and to be included in the pension... A majority of us want the same things. We also want COLA [cost-of-living raises] back.”
Workers arriving in Peoria, Illinois, to vote on the 2017 Caterpillar-UAW contract, which Jewell oversaw
Jewell’s indictment has implications far beyond just the 2015 Fiat Chrysler contract. As a retiree noted to the WSWS, “Chrysler was the lead in the 2015 negotiations. So GM and Ford followed what they negotiated. It’s called pattern bargaining. The entire UAW Big 3 was affected.”
Kathy, a contract worker at GM, said, “I had a feeling he was going to be indicted. It was just a question of when. It is past time. It was very strange in 2015 when they started the negotiations at Chrysler, even though it was the weakest one.
“At our job, we don’t have a pension or retirement benefits. They [the UAW] just tell us ‘be happy you have a job.’ The UAW says ‘the UAW and GM are one.’ They don't include the workers in that.”
Referring to the call by the WSWS for workers to form rank-and-file organizations independent of the unions, she concluded, “We need to get rank-and-file committees going now.”
“I’m waiting for the day they all get caught,” said a former Ford worker, one of many to suffer harassment and abuse at the Chicago Assembly Plant. “They are ruining workers lives!! I feel severely stripped after toiling so hard for Ford Motor Company.”
It is not only autoworkers who have suffered due to the UAW’s corruption and treachery. Jewell oversaw the negotiation of sellout agreements at agriculture equipment manufacturer John Deere in 2015 and at heavy equipment maker Caterpillar in 2017.
“The government and union have sold out the worker,” said a veteran worker at Caterpillar’s soon-to-close plant in Aurora, Illinois. The contract forced through by Jewell and the UAW sanctioned the closure of the Aurora plant and the layoff of approximately 800 workers.
“There were over 6,000 people working here in the late 1970s. Now there’s about 150. By end of year it will be closed.”
“Big business works hand in hand with government, along with unions,” he continued. “If he is guilty, he needs to go to prison, and employees should get pay raises, better health care, pay less on premiums. Take away everything he has and give it to Salvation Army.”
Angela, a veteran autoworker at FCA’s Kokomo Transmission plants and a member of the Steering Committee of Rank-and-File Committees, told the WSWS: “I met this guy in 2015. I’m confident he DID get rewarded handsomely to sell us that contract. He was abrasive, rude, arrogant and infuriating!!! I hope they bury him under the jail cell, find all of his assets and liquidate them!! Of course it was FCA that paid the bribe... I wonder how that was distributed amongst the UAW bosses?
“What [UAW President] Gary Jones said about waging a fight in 2019 is bluster. No matter what the UAW does or does not do, we are going to rely on ourselves. It’s the same everywhere. It’s capitalism.
Trump presses UAW to impose immediate concessions in bid to reopen Lordstown GM plant
By Shannon Jones 19 March 2019
Over the weekend President Donald Trump exchanged a flurry of tweets with both the United Auto Workers (UAW) and General Motors calling on the union and the company to come up with a deal to reopen the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant, which shut down March 6 after 53 years of operation.
The closure of the factory is another blow to an area that has been devastated by decades of deindustrialization. The Warren-Youngstown region in northeastern Ohio where the plant is located has been hard hit by the opioid crisis, reflecting the desperate conditions of wide sections of the working class. The final closure put 1,700 out of work with many facing a choice of unemployment or a gut wrenching relocation to distant plants. Another 8,000 jobs at supplier plants are also threatened.
Trump is a bitter enemy of the working class. However, the right-wing evolution of both the unions and the Democratic Party, which have overseen decades of attacks on the jobs and living standards of the working class, has permitted the billionaire president to posture as a champion of the working class with calls for the revival of manufacturing in the US. Left largely unsaid, but already revealed by the realities of the record corporate profits and stock market celebrated by Trump, is the understanding that the supposed manufacturing revival will be accomplished by a drastic further lowering of workers’ living standards, along with trade war and militarism.
Lordstown Assembly Complex
The feigned concern by real-estate tycoon Trump for the fate of Lordstown is at least in part motivated by electoral calculations. Trump was able to eke out an electoral college win over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by carrying industrial states that had historically voted Democratic by claiming he would bring back manufacturing jobs.
The UAW has not lifted a finger to defend the plants threatened with closure by GM. Union officials say that the fate of the plants will be discussed during the upcoming 2019 contract negotiations. Translated, this means the UAW will offer further concessions to GM in exchange for another round of worthless promises to keep plants open.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted, “Because the economy is so good, General Motors must get their Lordstown, Ohio plant open, maybe in a different form or with a new owner, FAST!” He went on to compare GM unfavorably with Toyota, which he said is “investing $13.5 billion in the US.”
The next day Trump tweeted, “Democrat [Lordstown] Local 1112 President David Green ought to get his act together and produce. G.M. let our country down, but other much better car companies are coming into the US in droves...”
The call by Trump to re-open the Lordstown GM plant with a “new owner” should be taken as a warning. A takeover of a former GM stamping plant in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 2010 under new management resulted in demands, backed by the UAW, for a 50 percent pay cut.
Trump and vice president Mike Pence also engineered the phony deal to “save” the Carrier heating furnace plant in Indianapolis, Indiana. After handing the company massive tax cuts, it laid off half of the workers, and with the assistance of the United Steelworkers, forced remaining workers to labor 60 hours a week with mandatory overtime.
The UAW and Local 1112 President David Green hardly need any encouragement to ram through concessions. The local has long been a model of corporatist labor-management collusion, imposing national and local concessions to save jobs even as the workforce was reduced from 13,000 to 1,700 and then to zero.
In response to Trump’s tweets, the international UAW issued a groveling message declaring, “Thank you for fighting alongside the UAW against GM. We will leave no stone unturned to keep the plants open!”
GM executives brushed aside Trump’s denunciations, defending its corporatist relationship with the UAW. “To be clear, under the terms of the UAW-GM National Agreement, the ultimate future of the unallocated plants will be resolved between GM and the UAW...” Management went on to tout its supposed concern for the affected workers, who the company has been slotting into jobs at other GM plants hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
Trump replied early Monday, tweeting, “General Motors and the UAW are going to start “talks” in September/October, Why wait, start them now!”
In an interview Monday, Green continued to grovel before Trump, stating, “We’re doing everything we can ... to convince General Motors CEO Mary Barra to reinvest in GM Lordstown.”
Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown rushed to the defense of the UAW, criticizing Trump for his “disgraceful” attempt to ridicule Local 1112 President Green while Brown promoted his American Cars, American Jobs Act, basically a taxpayer subsidy of US auto manufacturers.
Later Trump tweeted, “Close a plant in China or Mexico, where you invested so heavily pre-Trump,” and “Bring jobs home!”
Here Trump, Democrats and the UAW all line up behind the filthy lie that it is foreign workers, not the capitalist profit system and the insatiable appetite of the Wall Street investors behind GM, that are responsible for the destruction of jobs and living standards. But GM’s job cuts are part of a restructuring of the global auto industry, which is affecting workers throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Last Friday, Ford announced it was cutting at least 5,000 jobs in Germany and the UK, just days after VW announced the elimination of 7,000 jobs.
The rebellion of auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico, along with recent strikes by autoworkers in China, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Brazil, the UK and Canada, show the possibility for developing a globally coordinated response to these attacks.
Since the 2016 election, the UAW has thrown its full support behind Trump’s America First nationalism and trade war measures aimed at the foreign rivals of US capitalism. At the same time it is desperately seeking to demonstrate its continued usefulness to the corporations by suppressing the boiling opposition of workers while handing round after round of concessions to management.
The policies of both the UAW and Trump, based on the unconditional defense of capitalism, are aimed at slashing the wages and benefits of American workers to boost the profits of the automakers while diverting workers anger and opposition by pointing the finger at workers in Mexico and China who are supposedly “stealing” jobs.
However, the UAW is widely despised in the auto plants for its total subservience to the corporations, highlighted by the ongoing federal corruption investigation that this week netted Norwood Jewell, the lead UAW negotiator for the 2015 Fiat Chrysler contract. He was involved in a scheme to funnel millions of dollars in management bribes to UAW officials to obtain favorable contract terms. Lacking a popular base, the UAW apparatus is dependent for its continued existence on the patronage of the corporations and the government.
From the very first day of the announcement of GM’s plant closing plans the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter have been at the forefront of the fight to defend jobs. A December meeting in Detroit elected a steering committee of autoworkers that helped organize a February 9 demonstration outside GM headquarters in Detroit. Against the nationalism of the UAW, demonstrators called for the international unity of the working class in a common fight to defend jobs and oppose concessions. It advanced the call for the mobilization of the working class independent of the pro-company UAW through the construction of rank-and-file factory committees in every plant.
Preparations for the contract fight this summer must be made now through the formation of such factory committees in every location, and the building the momentum for a national strike and cross-border strikes to restore the concessions handed over by the UAW, halt the plant closings and rehire all laid off and victimized workers at full pay and benefits.
No amount of appeals to the corporate owners can defend jobs. The fight against plant closures requires a direct assault on private ownership of giant industries and banks and placing the auto companies and other big corporations under the democratic public ownership and control of the working class, which produces society’s wealth.
This requires a break with both the Democratic and Republican defenders of big business and the development of an independent political movement of the working class for socialism.
Norwood Jewell, left, at opening of 2015 contract UAW-Fiat Chrysler talks (Credit: uaw-chrysler.com)
Workers arriving in Peoria, Illinois, to vote on the 2017 Caterpillar-UAW contract, which Jewell oversaw
Lordstown Assembly Complex
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