UAW executives are “nothing more than
fat cats collecting huge checks”
Autoworkers denounce
company-UAW scheme to hire low-paid workers in the face of mass layoffs
By Tim Rivers
28 April 2018
There is growing outrage among autoworkers over a United Auto
Workers-General Motors scheme to lay off high seniority workers and hire
low-paid temporary workers, as part of an effort to drastically reduce labor
costs.
On Tuesday, the World Socialist
Web Site published an article exposing the rotten agreement. It
noted that GM reported that its subsidiary, Lordstown GM Subsystems, was hiring
low-paid temporary workers only days after GM announced the elimination of an
entire shift and 1,500 jobs at the giant Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant, under
a framework agreed by the UAW.
The article has been shared thousands of times and has been read
by tens of thousands of workers, once again sparking a groundswell of
opposition that erupted in 2015 against contracts rammed through by the UAW.
“UAW officials make $3,500.00 a week …
sitting in their office doing nothing,” wrote a worker from Lordstown to the
WSWS Autoworker Newsletter. “If you take a stand, they take you
to human resources and try to fire a union member.
“Now look! Behind your back, hiring a
lower wage worker. This is a very bad practice. … It is not a
living wage. To agree to this is simply bulls** t … This is not a
union. It’s nothing more than fat cats collecting huge checks and bonuses while
the workers are getting screwed.”
Another wrote, “This has and will cause untold hardship. These
people are not statistics. Many great people with lovely families. Worse still,
many will not know their fate until the last minute. In an already economically
depressed area [Youngstown, Ohio], the multiplier effect is going to cause much
hardship.
“If we aren’t able to make gains, or at the very least stay even,
when the company is making record profits, then how are we ever going to make
gains?”
And another autoworker wrote, “Just like 19th century England,
mired in poverty amidst unbridled wealth of the capitalist class, the USA is
thus replicating history.”
In a failed effort to stem the groundswell of opposition,
Lordstown shop chairman Dan Morgan issued a second leaflet to the members of
UAW local 1112 on Friday. He wrote, “Your Shop Chairman has had extensive
discussions with Local Management and the International Union regarding the
outsourcing of work as it pertains to the Competitive Operating Agreement
(COA). Your Chairman and the International Union are not in agreement with
Management’s position and we will aggressively resist all initiatives that put
a third party in our plant while we have team members on the street and no
product commitment.”
His leaflet is a pack of lies. Morgan and the rest of the UAW at
Local 1112 and on up the ladder will do nothing to defend jobs. In her public
statement on the matter, UAW international vice president for General Motors
Cindy Estrada declared, “For Lordstown, local leadership and management came to
Detroit, and with the region and national parties, an agreement was negotiated
to make changes that we believe will put the plant in a better position to stay
open.”
The COA was agreed to, accepted and signed off on by all the
relevant representatives of the union. To pretend today that they did not know
what was in store is a patent fraud.
This and every other agreement negotiated by the corrupt UAW must
be repudiated by autoworkers. They have been rendered null and void by the
revelations that top UAW officials have been taking payments from the auto
companies in exchange for pushing pro-company contracts.
The developments at Lordstown only provide further proof that the
UAW is not a workers organization, but a labor contractor, whose job is to
enforce poverty level wages on workers and do whatever it can to suppress
opposition.
Rank-and-file factory committees,
independent of the union and the company, must be organized to prepare and
coordinate opposition. The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter urges all
auto workers to contact us to help organize this fight.
It is particularly urgent that
autoworkers join their struggle with that of teachers throughout the US and
internationally. A series of strikes—in West Virginia, Oklahoma and now
Arizona—have demonstrated the role of the teachers unions in isolating and shutting down strikes, when they
cannot prevent them altogether. That is, they are playing the same role as the
UAW, attempting to isolate teachers and impose defeats.
A skilled tradesman at GM in Flint,
Michigan, spoke to the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter about the
situation. “What is happening to us is happening to teachers across the
country,” he said. “Their struggle is suppressed by the unions. They are being
controlled by the people who are being paid to represent them.”
He continued, “I would like to see all of labor band together and
strike. We are all in the same boat. As the saying goes, we will have to hang
together, or we are going to hang separately.”
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