As crisis grips UAW, Labor
Notes offers apology for corruption scandal
By Shannon Jones
20 February 2018
Since a federal investigation exposed rampant corruption within
the upper echelons of the United Auto Workers (UAW), there has been near
silence on the part of the various organizations that compose the pseudo-left
in the United States.
This is hardly surprising, since groups
such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist
Alternative, Jacobin magazine, Labor Notes and
others serve as craven apologists for the corrupt US trade union bureaucracy,
hailing every new sellout as a stunning victory. At the same time, members of
these fake left organizations have found a career path and lucrative salaries
through obtaining leading positions in the union apparatus.
The exposure of the UAW as a bribed
tool of management confirms the assessment by the World
Socialist Web Site that the unions are not workers’
organizations. On the contrary, they long ago broke any connection with the
class struggle and serve as enforcers of management dictates inside the
factories.
Nothing can revive these organizations, and class-conscious workers
must expose their role and fight for the building of factory committees to
assert the will of rank-and-file workers against the dictatorship in the plants
overseen by the UAW and the auto bosses.
Last week Labor Notes broke
its silence on the UAW corruption scandal. It published a piece based on an
interview with former UAW Local 1700 President Bill Parker conducted by Joe
Richards, a writer and a member of the International Socialist Organization
(ISO).
Parker offers no serious analysis of the scandal, which has
created an existential crisis for the UAW, an organization that is already
widely despised by autoworkers for its collaboration with corporate management
and suppression of workers struggles. Instead he offers an apologia for the
UAW, insisting that the company payoffs amounting into the millions of dollars
between 2009 and 2015 had no impact on contract negotiations.
Among those implicated were the late General Holiefield, UAW vice
president for Fiat Chrysler, and his successor Norwood Jewell. Holiefield’s
widow recently pleaded guilty to hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars paid
out to her companies from money siphoned off from the UAW-Chrysler National
Training Center (NTC).
In his interview, Parker echoes the lying claim by UAW President
Dennis Williams that the bribery of top UAW officials had no impact on contract
negotiations because they were based on “pattern agreements,” which was
accepted by the entire UAW leadership, including Williams’ predecessor Bob
King.
He writes, “At the national level, I think it largely didn’t
impact them. The negotiations by and large follow the pattern established at
the target company, and in 2011 the UAW picked GM as the pacesetter.” He
continues, “It would be hard to say there’s any direct correlation between the
corruption at FCA and the poor wages and benefits in that contract because the
same thing occurred at GM and Ford. In the national agreements, the UAW
president negotiates the wages and benefits, not the VPs like Holiefield.”
The fact that the entire UAW leadership backed contracts, which
sanctioned two-tier wages, 10-hour workdays, the expansion of temporary
part-time employees and other rollbacks, only underscores the fact that the
entire UAW apparatus is rotten to the core.
The payoffs to the UAW bureaucracy have not only taken the form of
cash payments and credit card purchases of designer clothes, air travel and
luxury hotels for Holiefield & Co. The auto bosses have literally funneled
billions to their UAW partners over the last four decades through
labor-management training centers and other corporatist schemes, as well as the
multibillion-dollar retiree health care trust fund.
Parker asks rhetorically if UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell’s
role in seeking to ram through the 2015 sellout agreement at Fiat Chrysler was
“the result of collusion,” concluding, “We may never know.”
Parker knows full well that Jewell’s charity, Making Our Children
Smile Foundation, received illegal training center payments, and that when
Jewell was named Holiefield’s successor in 2014, FCA executives spent $30,000
in training funds to throw him a lavish party at the UAW-Chrysler World Class
Manufacturing Academy.
A year later, Jewell was trying to ram a sellout contract down the
throats of FCA workers at a stormy union meeting at Chrysler Sterling Heights
Assembly Plant (SHAP), Parker’s former plant.
Labor Notes, whose conferences draw hundreds of
local level union officials, operates as a faction of the US trade union
bureaucracy. With lawsuits filed against the UAW increasing, along with demands
by rank-and-file workers to declare the current contracts null and void, the
union executives and their pseudo-left apologists see the growing signs of a
rebellion against the UAW and are running to its defense.
Parker has long played the role of a loyal oppositionist,
promoting illusions in the possibility of reforming the UAW, insisting that
workers never challenge the authority of this anti-working class organization,
let alone break free from its stranglehold.
In his interview, Parker, who was a member of the now defunct New
Directions group in the UAW, presents the UAW’s corporatist, pro-company
orientation as though it was a case of the flu that the union caught in the
1980s.
But the degeneration of the UAW, like other unions throughout the
US and internationally, was rooted in fundamental economic changes in the 1980s
and 1990s and the failure of these nationally based and pro-capitalist
organizations to respond in any progressive way to the global integration of
capitalist production. Faced with transnational corporations, which could shift
production anywhere in the world, the unions abandoned any resistance to the
employers and joined their “own” capitalist class to drive down wages and
increase “competitiveness.”
New Directions, which shared the nationalist, pro-capitalist
orientation of the UAW officialdom, and its political alliance with the
Democratic Party, provided no alternative and its leaders were either co-opted
into the Solidarity House bureaucracy or faded away after betraying local
struggles.
Parker played a key role in allowing the UAW to force through the
2007 agreement, which first established the hated two-tier wage system and
handed control of the retiree health care trust fund to the UAW. After offering
tepid opposition to the deal, Parker dropped his opposition after Holiefield
held a meeting with the rest of the local leadership and claimed the UAW had
obtained “job guarantees” for the Sterling Heights plant. Two years later the
value of these bogus promises was revealed when GM and Chrysler declared
bankruptcy and the Obama administration axed tens of thousands of jobs and
halved the wages of new hires.
Parker pathetically suggests autoworkers pin their hopes on the
upcoming UAW constitutional convention. However, he concedes that the
convention “is a difficult body to influence.”
In opposition to this bankrupt
perspective, the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter calls for
the formation of rank-and-file factory committees independent of the UAW to
serve as the genuine voice of autoworkers. Elected by all factory workers,
these committees should demand the overturning of all the contracts negotiated
by the UAW and fight for their own demands, including a twenty five percent
wage increase, the restoration of cost of living, the abolition of tiers and
the hiring of all part-time and temporary workers as full-time.
These committees must forge links with
autoworkers in Canada, Mexico and globally to coordinate their struggles with
the transnational auto companies. The resurgence of the class struggle poses
the necessity of building a powerful political movement of the working class,
based on a socialist and internationalist perspective, to put an end class
oppression, inequality and war once and for all. We urge workers to subscribe
to the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter and take up this fight.
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