“We are ready stay out as long as it takes”
Workers at GM, Ford, and Chrysler ready to strike in contract fight
Autoworkers across the US are voting to authorize a strike action when the current four-year labor agreements covering 155,000 General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers in the US expires a little over three weeks from now, at midnight on September 14. Fiat Chrysler workers at Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) in suburban Detroit and the Jeep assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois were among the first to vote Thursday, with voting continuing next week and the tallies expected by August 29.
Second shift workers entering the truck plant in suburban Detroit
At the factory gates Thursday afternoon, Fiat Chrysler workers were anxious to talk to reporters from the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletterabout the issues they want addressed in the new contracts. Many spoke of eliminating the hated two-tier wage system, which starts newly-hired full-time workers at half the pay of so-called legacy workers, i.e. those hired before 2007. These second-tier or so-called in-progression workers must work eight years to reach top pay and wait years before receiving basic medical coverage like dental and optical insurance.
“We got to get rid of the tiers,” was a common refrain. Others said, “We need more money,” and denounced claims by the auto companies that they could not afford raises when they were making record profits and paying their CEOs millions. “We need to get everything we gave up back and then some,” said a worker as she walked into the plant.
Warren Truck workers discuss upcoming contract
Many workers said they were ready to strike if the auto companies attempted to impose higher out-of-pocket health care expenses on them or cut their benefits by putting them under a plan run by the United Auto Workers union. The conspiracy by the auto companies and the union to expand the United Auto Workers Retiree Medical Benefits Trust to cover current employees, was a major factor in the 2-to-1 defeat of the UAW-FCA contract in 2015.
“We are ready to strike and to stay out as long as it takes,” said a worker with eight years at the FCA Warren Truck Plant, just north of Detroit. “I had to come back to work because the co-pays for my husband’s medical plan are horrible. He’s a retired Chrysler worker and my insurance is better than his.”
FCA workers at Warren Truck plant
A number of Warren Truck workers with over 20 years seniority said the thousands of temporary part-time workers hired by the company since the last contract in 2015 needed to get all the benefits the full-time workers have, including profit-sharing, health care, and job protections, and be converted to full-timers.
There is widespread disgust with the UAW and no confidence in its ability to represent autoworkers. A significant number of the UAW officials on the union bargaining committee who “negotiated” the sellout agreement in 2015 have been convicted or implicated in the multi-million-dollar bribery scandal. This includes four leaders of the UAW-FCA negotiations, including UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell, who took bribes to sign the pro-company deal.
The indictments have now spread to the UAW-GM bargaining committee in 2015, including Michael Grimes, who federal prosecutors say took $1.99 million in kickbacks from vendors contracted by the UAW-GM Center for Human Resources. UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada, who led the GM talks in 2015 and is now leading the FCA negotiations is currently under investigation.
The corruption scandal that has engulfed the UAW flows out of the entire pro-corporate and nationalist orientation of the UAW, which has for decades sought to impose concessions on workers in the name of defending “American jobs.”
Expressing the fear that the UAW will not be able to contain another rebellion by rank-and-file workers, industry publication Wards Auto wrote Wednesday, “The scandal is placing substantial pressure on the UAW’s leadership, undermining both its authority and credibility at a critical time when it must decide what contract terms to accept and then sell them to a skeptical membership.”
The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter has called for autoworkers to throw out the UAW bargaining committees and elect a bargaining committee made up of trusted rank-and-file workers from every factory. In order to prevent backroom deals, all talks should be live-streamed.
The break with the UAW must be part of a fight to build a network of rank-and-file committees in every factory, to mobilize the strength of workers to fight for independent demands throughout the country and in solidarity with their class brothers and sisters all over the world.
Workers should call in-person and online meetings to formulate their own set of demands, based on what workers and their families need, not what the corporations and the UAW say is affordable. These should include:
• Stop all plant closings and layoffs, reopen Lordstown, Ohio and other shuttered plants, and rehire all laid-off and victimized workers.
• Eliminate the tier system, with all workers immediately brought up to top pay.
• Convert all temporary and part-time workers to fulltime, with no loss of seniority.
• A 40 percent wage increase and restoration of COLA! Restore overtime pay for work after eight hours and weekends! Increase company paid pensions and health care benefits for retirees.
• Abolish labor-management committees! For real industrial democracy and workers’ control over production, line speed and safety.
Autoworkers must prevent the UAW from dragging the contracts past the September 14 deadline or from calling a bogus “Hollywood strike” designed to have the least impact on the corporations and pave the way for another sellout.
Instead workers must uphold the principle “No contract, no work!” and prepare a national strike by GM, Ford and FCA workers to shut down the entire auto and auto parts industry. This should include spreading the strike to the non-union transplants in the southern US states and appealing to workers in Mexico, Canada and internationally for cross-border actions.
A Warren Truck worker mocked the UAW, saying sarcastically, “Of course, the corruption had no effect on the contract. The UAW has been jerking us around for years. The whole lot of the bargaining committee should be thrown out. I agree with you, rank-and-file workers should form our own bargaining committee.”
“We should have workers oversee the negotiations,” another worker said. “We have no say-so over anything with the UAW. Anytime we challenge something the company is doing the union says, ‘You voted for it.’ But we never see the fine print in the contracts they sign.
“Safety is the most important issue,” another worker said. “We have injuries and excessive working conditions. It’s loud and we breathe bad air. OSHA is not forcing the company to adhere to safety standards and the union is always modifying the contract to let the company get away with anything. Instead of protecting us, the UAW is on the company’s side.”
Karen, a veteran SHAP worker, said, “It is all hush-hush with the UAW. They don’t tell us anything.” She agreed with replacing the UAW bargaining committee with a workers committee. “It has to come from us, the workers. The UAW isn’t fighting for us, they are working for the company. Workers are talking though, and we know what it’s really going on here."
Another worker said, “Union officials hear that federal investigators are looking into them and they suddenly retire and collect a pension. How can we be paying for that? That’s my demand: no pensions for the people who stole from us.”
Last month, the Wall Street Journal warned that the “One big wild card in this round of talks” was the fact that nearly 42% of the Detroit Three’s unionized workforce has never experienced a slowdown in the U.S. car sector…Negotiators for the companies worry that this group of workers” will pose a tougher challenge in terms of predictability because they have less exposure to economic hard times…”
With the collusion of the UAW between 2007 and 2015, all-in labor costs for FCA fell from $76 to $47 an hour, $73 to $55 for GM, and $70 down to $57 for Ford. Second-tier, temporary and contract workers, some making as little as $13 an hour, are producing one Jeep Cherokee every 47 seconds and $10,000 per minute at the Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit. So-called legacy workers, making over $30 an hour, have seen their own wages stagnate along with a concerted effort by both the companies and the UAW to drive them out and replace them with low-paid workers.
“We want an end to the tiers and equal pay for equal work,” another Warren Truck worker said. “Over the last 16 years we have lost something in all four of the contracts. Now GM wants to follow Chrysler’s lead and get more temps and contract workers. These young workers are building high-end vehicles and they can’t even afford a used car. The TPTs pay union dues and the UAW does nothing to defend them. It’s taxation without representation.
Dan, a SHAP worker who is getting ready to retire, said, “For the last 25 years I have voted to strike every time and against every contract. Things have only gotten worse and worse, and we are supposed to believe the union is working for us? No, they are not fighting for us. They just ask us year after year to give and give and all they do is take and take.”
Dan explained that among his most important demand is abolishing the tier system, even though he is in the highest tier. “I am mostly worried about the new younger workers. A job here used to mean decent pay, enough to live. Now you can hardly get by. The tier system divides workers, plain and simple. I hope the younger workers fight back. I would support them.”
“It’s ludicrous the way they treat the temps”
GM autoworker speaks out on UAW corruption, upcoming contract fight
Workers at Fiat Chrysler plants in Michigan and Illinois will begin voting today to authorize strike action when the labor agreements covering 44,000 FCA workers expire at midnight on September 14. Workers at General Motors, Ford and the remaining FCA plants will continue voting next week to endorse strike action if no agreement is reached on deal covering a total of 155,000 GM, Ford and FCA workers in the US.
After suffering more than a decade of falling real wages, substandard pay and benefits for younger generation of workers who must labor eight years to reach top pay and other abuses, autoworkers are determined to fight to win substantial gains from the automakers, which have made record profits since the 2009 bankruptcy restructuring of GM and FCA by the Obama administration.
The UAW—which has not called a national auto strike since 1976—is determined to do everything to beat back workers and impose yet another pro-company deal. The corruption scandal engulfing the union has exposed the UAW as a wholly owned subsidiary of the auto companies whose “negotiators” are on the payroll of corporate management. That is why autoworkers must take the initiative now to block another sellout by forming rank-and-file committees in every factory to outline demands that workers need, not what management and the UAW says are affordable, and to prepare a national strike to shut down the auto and auto parts industry.
Given the global character of the industry, it is imperative that US workers reach out to workers in Mexico, Canada and around the globe to coordinate cross-border action to fight the attack on jobs and conditions by the transnational corporations.
The World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter recently discussed these issues with a veteran GM worker at the company’s Bay City Powertrain Plant in central Michigan. Located 115 miles north of Detroit, Bay City is one of many impoverished mid-sized factory towns that dot the state. From a high of 53,000 residents in 1960, the population has fallen to an estimated 33,000 today. The official poverty rate is 22.1 percent. To raise money, the cash-strapped city government has recently floated a plan to sell off the four drawbridges over the Saginaw River, the only roads connecting the two halves of the city, to private entities, which would charge tolls to motorists.
“At the Bay City GM powertrain plant there may be 300 people, less than that if you don't count the part timers,” he said. As with other facilities run by GM, Ford and Chrysler, part-time workers have no rights and are subject to arbitrary treatment by management even though they pay union dues to the UAW. “It is ludicrous the way they treat the temps. Every Sunday night they call them and tell them what days they will be working the next week.
“One kid left a job at Home Depot because he was called and told to start work the following Monday at the plant. He was happy to be starting at GM and quit his job right then and there. Then they called him on Sunday and told him the last seven temps hired in they weren’t going to be hired in after all. His dad worked in the plant and everyone raised such a fuss that finally HR reversed themselves and hired the workers.”
He continued, “The lowest seniority temps get hit the worst. They were working five to seven days a week over a three-year period but now they've been cut back to two days a week. They just say, ‘we don't need so many people.’ And the union says, ‘they can do that.’
“Everyone where I am knows that if you file a grievance, the union committeeman will first go to management to hear their side before he has even heard yours!”
The autoworker traced the degeneration of the unions back to corporatist policies enacted by the UAW in the 1980s. “It all started with [UAW President Owen] Bieber back in 1982,” he said, referring to the former GM department head for the UAW who became union president in 1982. Two years after the UAW handed over massive concessions during the first Chrysler bailout, “GM came back and cried they were hurting so they reopened and renegotiated the contract. That's when they came up with all these ‘jointness’ programs.” Bieber pushed through sellout contracts containing lump sum payments instead of wage increases and new committees jointly administered by the company and the union. Between 1982 and 2000, GM transferred $3 billion to the UAW through joint training programs, which became the center of the illegal bribery schemes.
“When I don't get to vote for the president and the vice president of the union then they feel they are untouchable and that they can do anything. They appoint our Benefit Rep, we don't elect him, so does nothing. But that is how the whole international works. They took our plant chairman of our plant, plucked him right out of the plant, and brought him down to Solidarity House (the UAW headquarters in Detroit). He said he didn't want to go, then they snap their fingers and he was down there in a minute.
“We sent two delegates to the national convention. They voted Gary Jones as president of the union. The next day he gave himself a 33 percent raise, or $47,000 more. I only found this out a month later. Our two delegates did not come back and report this. We sent them to represent us and they did not even tell us that this happened. They came back and sat on their hands.”
The worker pointed to the globalization of the auto industry, which has resulted in the integration of production all across the world. “I used to work at Buick in Pontiac. Remember the big fuss, in the news and all, when people found Pontiac engines in Buick cars? Now the parts are from all over the world. No one blinks an eye. I wonder what the auto corporations are thinking with Trump in office? For the last 15 to 20 years they have set up this worldwide system and now what?”
In fact, GM’s steering parts plants nearby Saginaw were first sold off to Delphi (the spinoff of GM parts division that went bankrupt in 2005), before being sold to Nexteer Automotive, which is owned by Chinese parts maker Pacific Century Motors. After workers at the plant overwhelmingly rejected a UAW-backed contract at the Nexteer plant in late 2015, the UAW called a 20-hour strike and then rammed through even deeper concessions.
The former Big Three industrial icons of American capitalism have been integrated into a complex system of global production and the struggle by giant transnational corporations to beat out competitors for markets and to dominate the new electric and self-driving technologies. This underscores the need to reject the nationalist poison promoted by the UAW, the Trump administration and the Democrats and fight for the international unity of autoworkers against the capitalist system.
Joe Ashton, UAW VP named in corruption scandal, had long history of selling out auto workers
The latest top United Auto Workers union official to be implicated in the ongoing corruption scandal is former UAW Vice President for General Motors Joe Ashton. According to the Detroit News, several sources with inside knowledge of the federal investigation have identified Joe Ashton as the anonymous “Union Official 1” who federal prosecutors say took $550,000 in kickbacks in an illegal scheme involving training funds from the UAW-GM Human Resource Center in Detroit.
Joe Ashton
Ashton’s top aide Mike Grimes was named in a legal complaint, which was unsealed last week in federal court, charging him with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering for receiving $1.99 million in kickbacks from suppliers of jackets, watches, backpacks and other union-branded items. Grimes, Ashton and UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada—who is also under investigation by the Justice Department—all sat on the board of the joint UAW-GM facility when it approved the use of more than $4 million in training funds to contract vendors to produce the items. It appears that Grimes is spilling the beans on his former bosses.
Ashton’s alleged crimes come as no surprise to those familiar with his record. A life-long UAW functionary who has been on the payroll of the UAW International staff for 28 years, Ashton is proof that the foulest elements rise to the top in this rotten organization.
Ashton joined the UAW in 1969, while working at ITE Circuit in Philadelphia. He worked his way up the ladder of the union bureaucracy and was brought onto the International Union staff in the mid-1980s, a period when the UAW was handing over massive concessions to the auto companies and colluding in the shutdown of hundreds of factories. This also coincided with the proliferation of various labor-management schemes, including joint training centers.
In 2003, Ashton became assistant director of UAW Region 9, which covers western and central New York, New Jersey and portions of Pennsylvania and then took over as regional director from 2006 to 2010. This was the period in which GM, Ford and Chrysler shut down their remaining plants on the East Coast of the United States and the UAW colluded with the employers to strip Delphi (former GM parts) workers of their jobs and pensions and betrayed the bitter 2008 American Axle strike in western New York and Michigan. While assisting in the destruction of the jobs and livelihoods of thousands of UAW members, Ashton proved adept getting a few thousand dues paying members from the Atlantic City casinos. His services were rewarded with positions on New Jersey and Pennsylvania AFL-CIO executive councils and a position as a corporate director the Western New York Federal Bank, one of many corporate boards he would join.
GM workers at the now shuttered Lordstown, Ohio plant
In one particularly telling episode involving Ashton’s region, UAW President Bob King and secretary-treasurer Dennis Williams set themselves up as the two-person board of directors for the “International UAW Region 9 New York Training Initiative,” a non-profit funded by the New York Department of Labor tasked with training Perry’s Ice Cream workers on “new equipment and technology.” The state labor department paid the company nearly $939,840 between 2010 and 2012 to the union-run “training initiative,” and the UAW paid Perry’s Ice Cream $579,463 to train its own 127 workers. As Thomas Adams, a former Flint autoworker and long-time critic of the UAW’s corporatist schemes, wrote recently, “When Perry’s Ice Cream celebrated its 95th anniversary in 2013, the firm must have had the best-trained ice cream makers in the history of making ice cream.”
The former regional director also left several Ashtons on the Region 9 payroll, including Patrick Ashton, International Servicing Representative for Region 9 in New Jersey who made $128,052 last year and Thomas Ashton, Region 9 Assistant Director, $147,187. When this WSWS reporter called Region 9 to determine whether these were Joe Ashton’s sons, the person on the phone said she did not know.
In June 2010, UAW President Bob King selected Ashton to head the UAW-GM department, the year after the union had colluded with the Obama administration in the restructuring of GM and Chrysler. The union accepted historic concessions, including a 50 percent wage cut for newly hired “second-tier” workers, a six-year no-strike pledge, the elimination of the eight-hour day and more plant closings and mass layoffs. In exchange, the UAW was handed control of a multi-billion retiree health care trust fund, largely paid in GM and Chrysler stocks.
One of his first acts as UAW-GM vice president was to work with UAW Region 3 Director Mo Davison to impose on contract on GM workers at the Indianapolis Stamping Plant that would have cut their wages in half in order to attract a new owner to the plant, which was being closed as part of the bankruptcy restructuring.
The UAW called a snap meeting of the Local 23 union on August 15, 2010 to browbeat the workers into accepting the sellout deal. However, when Ashton’s enforcer Mike Grimes got up to speak, he was shouted down by angry workers and forced to flee the meeting. The workers defiantly defeated Ashton’s repeated efforts to ram through the deal on behalf of Wall Street asset stripper Justin Norman. Fearing that this could spark a rebellion among rank-and-file workers with a new contract coming up in 2011, the UAW colluded in the shutdown of the factory.
Ashton, Grimes and Pietrzyk have all been implicated in the kickback scheme.
Ashton and Grimes were all leading members of the 2011 UAW-GM Bargaining Committee, which signed a labor agreement providing no pay or pension increases to workers who had suffered a pay freeze since 2003—costing each worker $30,000--despite record-setting corporate profits of $7.8 billion. With opposition mounting, Ashton and other UAW bureaucrats said a rejection would only lead to an arbitrator imposing an even more concessionary contract, since the UAW had signed a pledge not to strike until 2015.
After pushing the sellout deal past 49,000 GM workers, Ashton boasted that “The UAW has shown that we are totally committed to helping the US auto companies succeed,” adding that he would “love to see” 40 percent of GM’s workforce paid tier-two wages by the end of the contract because “that would mean we are adding new jobs.”
Ashton retired from the UAW vice presidency in 2014 to join the GM corporate board of directors as the representative of the multi-billion-dollar UAW Retiree Medical Benefits trust. At the time, GM Chairman Tim Solso praised him, saying, “Joe brings a wealth of knowledge from his work across many industries, especially his deep understanding how labor strategy can contribute to a company’s success.”
Ashton’s successor at the UAW-GM department Cindy Estrada and Grimes were leading members of the 2015 bargaining Committee, which violated the union’s own statutes and pushed through deep concessions despite a “No” vote by GM skilled workers. The deal expanded the number of low-paid temporary and contract workers and gave a green light to the closing of five North American factories, including in Lordstown, Ohio, Oshawa, Canada and Detroit, Michigan.
The UAW-GM Human Resource Center in Detroit
In December 2017, Ashton announced he was resigning from GM’s board, within weeks of being linked to a federal grand jury investigation into illegal payoffs to UAW officials.
The corruption of Ashton, Grimes & Co. is not the exception to the rule, it expresses the essence of the UAW, which has spent the last four decades colluding with the auto corporations to destroy the gains won by autoworkers through generations of mass struggle.
Between the time Ashton first became an International UAW representative in 1986 to today, the number of UAW hourly workers at GM has fallen from 353,000 to 49,000, and the total number of Big Three UAW workers from 537,000 to 155,000. Between 1982 and 2000 GM spent $3 billion on joint programs, with Ford and Chrysler paying out $1.3 billion between 1996 and 1999 alone, according to UAW critic Thomas Adams. Since 2005, when the figures were first reported to the US Labor Department, the UAW has received $387 million in “Joint Funds Reimbursements” from the auto companies.
When the UAW enters into “negotiations,” it is not to protect the wages, benefits and conditions of the workers it claims to represent but to determine what portion of the money the union helps management rob from workers will be funneled back into the bank accounts of the UAW.
The transformation of the UAW into a multi-billion-dollar business and cheap labor contractor is not simply the result of personal corruption, but the failure of the nationalist and pro-capitalist program of all the unions.
With less than one month to the expiration of the four year labor agreements for 155,000 GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers, autoworkers must take the initiative to build rank-and-file factory committees, independent of the UAW, to take the conduct of the contract struggle into their own hands and prepare a national strike in the auto and auto parts industry to overturn all of UAW-backed concessions. Such a struggle must be based on a new strategy, above all the fight for the international unity of autoworkers against the global assault on jobs and living standards and the capitalist profit system.
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