UAW seeks to deflect role in stoking anti-Asian hate with phony pledge to fight “xenophobia and racism”
The ongoing anti-China campaign, escalated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, has reached a new pitch with the embrace by the Biden administration and corporate media of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory.
The predictable result of this nationalist and jingoist agitation has been an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, which have risen dramatically in recent months. While the Biden administration has hypocritically attempted to distance itself from the most inflammatory statements by fascistic elements in Congress, it is fully implicated.
This is equally true of the American trade unions. For decades they have played a leading role in the demonization of foreign workers, in particular Asians and Mexicans, for taking “American jobs,” while suppressing their own role in signing off on job losses and plant closures.
Anti-Asian prejudice alongside other forms of xenophobia directed against immigrants has a long and ugly history in the United States, going back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 19th century, enacted with the enthusiastic support of the American Federation of Labor. Exclusion laws targeted not just Chinese, but Japanese and other Asian immigrants, and were justified by the AFL in vile, racist terms based on the claim that Asians displaced white Americans workers.
Such reactionary agitation laid the basis for the forced internment of Japanese Americans, the majority who were US citizens, during World War II by the Roosevelt administration.
Among the worst offenders in recent decades has been the United Auto Workers union, whose anti-Japanese campaigns of the 1980s boiled over into violence.
Now, however, the UAW is trying to cover up its tracks by recently endorsing, along with other US unions, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance’s pledge to end anti-Asian racism. The pledge supposedly commits unions to take “concrete actions” including addressing “racism and xenophobia in the workplace.”
In signing on to this pledge, the United Auto Workers makes no effort to account for its record in promoting anti-foreigner and anti-Asian sentiment. But the targeting of foreign workers, which began in earnest in the 1980s, went hand in hand with the UAW’s imposition of concessions and the union’s embrace of corporatist union-management collaboration. Anti-foreigner scapegoating has been central to the narrative advanced by the UAW ever since.
Endless concessions are presented as necessary to ensure the competitiveness of the US-based auto companies against overseas rivals. This fratricidal logic leads to pitting US workers against their counterparts in Asia, Europe and Latin America in a continuing competition to undermine wages and working conditions in an endless downward spiral.
Over the same period, the unions have amassed billions of dollars in cash even as their dues base has collapsed. The UAW employs a small army of officials “earning” six-figure salaries, which are financed through direct infusions of corporate cash through joint labor-management training centers, the union’s control of corporate stock, and overt bribes of the type that have landed over a dozen union officials, including the last two union presidents Gary Jones and Dennis Williams, in prison.
The UAW has never taken responsibility for its role in the brutal 1982 murder of Chinese American draftsman Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat in Highland Park, Michigan. The attack was carried out by a Chrysler foreman, Ronald Ebens, and his unemployed stepson, Michael Nitz, who mistook Chin for Japanese. One of the attackers yelled, “It's because of you little (expletives) that we're out of work!”
The murder of Chin took place in the midst of a vicious anti-Japanese campaign conducted by the UAW over mass layoffs. UAW officials declared “remember Pearl Harbor” and invited autoworkers to smash Japanese-built cars with a sledgehammer. To this day, foreign-built vehicles, primarily Japanese, are banned from UAW parking lots.
Ebens and Nitz never spent a day in prison for their crime. A plea bargain reduced their sentence to three years probation for manslaughter and a token $3,000 fine. After public outcry, a federal civil rights prosecution followed. However, Ebens’ conviction was overturned on appeal.
In an interview with this reporter, conducted in 2012, James Shimoura, a Michigan attorney who provided legal advice to the mother of Vincent Chin, described the climate at the time of the killing.
“The rhetoric at the time was virulent. There were union leaders smashing Japanese cars with hammers and bats and there were public pronouncements by politicians and people in the corporate area targeting Japanese car manufacturers as being the cause of the recession. It was a campaign of disinformation to deflect public opinion away from the real cause, which was quite complex. At a time of a very hostile public reaction, you try to find scapegoats to deflect the anger.”
Under conditions of mounting trade war, deepening economic crisis intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and war preparations, the ruling class, with the support of the unions, is ramping up all forms of racism and chauvinism.
The UAW has been in the lead on this, giving its full support to the Trump administration’s trade war policies and America First demagogy and now embracing the Biden administration’s Buy American campaign, which targets China as well as Mexico.
The Biden administration is directly enlisting the support of the UAW in prosecuting its anti-China campaign. At an appearance at the Ford River Electric Vehicle Center at the Rouge complex outside Detroit on May 18, Biden promoted his nationalist American Jobs Plan. He praised UAW President Rory Gamble by name while touting the role the unions must play in prosecuting economic warfare against China, which he accused of cornering the market on “raw materials and supplies” for electric vehicle batteries. Referring again to China he declared, “I got news for them: They will not win this race.”
He also urged American automakers to “deepen your partnership with the UAW.” In plain language, this means to “deepen” the incestuous financial ties between the union and the company in order to clamp down on mounting opposition among autoworkers and divert them along nationalist lines.
Whatever the pretensions of the UAW, the upsurge in anti-Asian hate crimes is a completely foreseeable, and indeed inevitable, outgrowth of its promotion of “America First” nationalism. Attacks on Asians can only increase in the period ahead after the embrace by the Democratic Party, with which the UAW is aligned, of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory that claims China is to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore the loss of millions of lives.
In reality, workers face a common global fight. This has been made crystal clear by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has confronted workers all over the world with the fact that corporations have demanded that workers’ health and safety be sacrificed for the sake of profit.
Recently, Indian autoworkers have carried out strikes against unsafe working conditions as the COVID-19 pandemic rages in South Asia. Their courageous action underscores the fact that the fight to save workers’ lives is a global fight against capitalism, which values profit above health and safety.
The struggle against nationalism is essential to the defense of even the most elementary rights of the working class. Workers, after all, confront transnational corporations that include workers all over the world in a single production process.
The most conscious expression of this is the rapid growth of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. The IWA-RFC is a new form of workers’ organization, independent of the corrupt, pro-corporate unions, based on an international strategy and perspective. It has representatives from workplaces all over the world and is seeking to unite workers globally to fight for their common interests.
In response to blackmail from the UAW to accept a concessions contract or be starved out on the picket line in a long a fruitless strike, workers in the rank-and-file committee at Volvo Truck's New River Valley plant in Dublin, Virginia declared in a statement: "Workers want to unite. If the enemy wants to wage war on us, we must be prepared to open up new fronts in their rear, including at Volvo’s operations in Sweden, France, Belgium, the UK, and Poland."
Smithfield meatpackers in South Dakota reject local contract by 99 percent, press for strike action
Meatpacking workers at a Smithfield Foods pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota rejected a proposed contract by a 99 percent margin on June 3, setting up a potential strike at a facility that provides five percent of the country’s pork production. A strike vote is being conducted by the United Food and Commercial Workers union on Monday.
The contract rejection is a further demonstration of the enormous pent-up anger and opposition among workers after a year of social murder by the world’s governments and major corporations over the course of the pandemic. In country after country, miners, health care workers, teachers and educators, autoworkers and other key sections of the working class are conducting strikes and protests.
Increasingly, corporate demands for more sacrifice, which have been supported by the trade unions, are being met with militant refusal by workers. On Sunday, Volvo Truck workers in southwestern Virginia voted down a second contract proposal by an overwhelming 90 percent, and in April, miners at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama rejected an agreement by 1,006 to 45. The deals had been backed by the United Auto Workers and United Mine Workers of America unions, respectively.
The meatpacking industry was already among the most unsafe in the United States before the pandemic, with one of the highest rates of industrial accidents, primarily repetitive motion injuries. Notoriously, it has also been among the worst hit by the coronavirus.
Nearly 30 percent of the 194,000 meatpacking workers in the United States have tested positive over the past year and at least 296 have died, according to the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Unsanitary and cramped conditions on the line, where proper cleaning and social distancing protocols are impossible, have made such figures inevitable.
Meatpacking plants have also been major transmission vectors into the wider community, particularly in rural areas. According to researchers from University of California, Davis, counties with large beef- or pork-packing facilities had infection rates more than double that of similar counties during the first 150 days of the pandemic. Another study by researchers from Columbia and the University of Chicago linked as many as 310,000 infections and 5,200 deaths to outbreaks at nearby meatpacking plants.
The Sioux Falls plant was the site of one of the earliest major outbreaks in the industry. Out of a workforce of 3,700, 1,294 have been infected and four have died, according to OSHA. At one point last April, the plant accounted for the large majority of coronavirus infections in the state of South Dakota. Following protests by workers, the plant was temporarily idled.
Opposition is mounting inside the plant, expressed indirectly by huge rates of absenteeism, with hundreds of workers out on long-term medical leave. Forty-nine people quit over the previous week alone, according to UFCW Local 304A President B.J. Motley.
In spite of the public health disaster centered on the plant, Smithfield is arrogantly demanding increases of roughly $200 per year to workers’ out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. Workers at the plant already make below the area average for the industry, with a starting wage of $17 per hour compared to $19 at a nearby JBS plant. The UFCW has said it is asking the company to back off on its health care demands and increase starting wages to the level of JBS.
“We’re not heroes anymore, are we?” a worker with nine years at the plant, Anthony Yesker, told the Associated Press. “They should at least look that we all put our lives on the line to keep the company going.”
While the constant refrain in every contract negotiation is that there is simply not enough money to pay workers livable wages, provide fully paid health care and retirement, and ensure safe working conditions, this is belied by the huge sums handed over to corporate executives and shareholders throughout the social and economic crisis triggered by the pandemic. In Smithfield’s case, its parent company, Hong Kong’s WH Group, the biggest pork processor in the world, announced over the weekend that it will spend up to $1.9 billion in a new share repurchase program in order to drive up its stock price, a move that will primarily benefit the company’s largest investors.
The UFCW has felt compelled to hold a strike vote, due to the provocative demands by management and widespread anger among workers. However, throughout the pandemic the union has played the main role in ensuring the continuation of production in order to maintain the company’s flow of profits. The UFCW thus bears direct responsibility for the deaths at Smithfield and other facilities throughout the country.
While Motley is now posturing as an opponent of management, Smithfield, for its own reasons, was able to cite a statement by Motley from last May praising the limited safety measures introduced by the company during its shutdown. “Smithfield is doing everything they can for the employees and their safety,” Motley said at the time. “We stand with Smithfield to get this plant back open.”
Similar statements were made last year by local UFCW officials at plants throughout the country. The most egregious example was at Tyson’s pork plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where the local even worked with management to introduce a perfect attendance bonus as hundreds were falling sick in the facility, and as management was taking bets on the number of workers who would catch the virus. When a scandal broke out over the betting scheme last fall, the UFCW hid behind its lawyers in response to local press inquiries. The response prompted even local Sheriff Tony Thompson, head of the county’s emergency response team, to observe that the union was “very comfortable with Tyson supervisors and far less representative of the workers who were getting sick.”
“The first thought I had was, ‘Shame on Tyson corporate,’” Thompson said. “But that was very closely followed by, ‘Doesn’t Tyson have a union that should be protecting these people? And if they don’t, why don’t they? And if they do, where the hell are they?’”
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