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.
Saturday, February 9, 2019
AMERICA'S RULING CLASS FEAR OF SOCIALISM...... Except for Wall Street!
"The reality of capitalism: GM makes $11.8 billion in profits while closing plants, eliminating 14,000 jobs"
“People are tired of not being able to pay their bills while the rich eat filet mignon”
The working class and socialism
9 February 2019
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump capped his State of the Union speech by declaring, “Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country… Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
Just three days after Trump’s anti-socialist outburst, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing just what is motivating the fear of socialism: the growth of the class struggle. According to the BLS, the number of workers who went on strike last year was the highest since 1986—more than three decades. Last year, more than half a million US workers went on strike, a 20-fold increase over 2017.
The largest work stoppage was last April’s strike by 81,000 Arizona teachers and staff, resulting in 486,000 lost man-days. The strike by 20,000 Oklahoma teachers that same month resulted in 405,000 lost man-days. The BLS added, “Statewide major work stoppages in educational services also occurred in West Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado, and North Carolina.”
This wave of struggles has intensified in the New Year—in the United States, throughout North America, and all over the world. In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of teachers went on strike last month. Seventy thousand workers in auto plants in Matamoros, Mexico launched a major strike that is already disrupting auto production in the United States, and which is spreading to other sections of the working class.
And this is only the beginning.
Since the crushing of the PATCO strike in 1981, the American ruling class has presided over decades of deindustrialization, mass layoffs, and pay and benefit concessions. The trade unions have collaborated in implementing all these measures, selling out every struggle, endorsing every plant closure, and calling every defeat a victory.
This has resulted in the most dramatic upward redistribution of wealth in American history.
Just three people in the US control as much wealth as the bottom half of society. In the ten years since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled. Every two days, a new billionaire is created.
Over the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $2.5 billion a day, while the wealth of the poorest half of humanity fell by a staggering 11 percent.
Nowhere within the political establishment is there any expression of the social and political interests of the vast majority of the population. Trump’s far-right politics is more and more basing itself on the central characteristic of every fascistic movement: the explicit hatred of socialism.
The Democratic Party, for its part, centers its politics on the repudiation of any appeal to the working class. It has instead sought to create a “populist” movement around an amalgamation of racial and cultural identities, based on the fiction that the basic social division is not class, but race and gender. This is the politics of the upper-middle class, competing over positions of power and privilege, aligned with dominant sections of the financial oligarchy and the military-intelligence apparatus.
In an effort at political chloroforming, the Democrats have elevated a handful of figures—such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—whose task is to provide a left gloss for a right-wing party.
In their replies to Trump’s State of the Union speech, however, both made clear that they are not, in fact, socialists. Asked if “socialism” is a “winning message,” Ocasio-Cortez declared, “at the end of the day, it's not about an ‘ism.’ And I think that's exactly what the president is trying to do. He’s trying to mischaracterize, frame, associate.”
In his 27-minute-long reply to Trump’s speech, Sanders refused to use the term socialism except as a pejorative, complaining that the United States has “socialism for the rich.”
Commenting on Trump’s invocation of the “Socialist Menace,” New York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman, an apologist for the Democrats, declared, “Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky,” adding, “Let’s just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn’t radical at all.”
Krugman here is right. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are not “radical at all,” much less actual socialists.
One hundred and seventy years ago, at the birth of the modern socialist movement, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto that “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”
Now, when this same “specter of communism” haunts the ruling class, socialists must state clearly what they stand for. Socialists call for not a few reforms, impossible under capitalism, but the seizure of the wealth of the ruling class and the total reorganization of society. We call for the transformation of the major corporations into public utilities, democratically controlled by the working class, to ensure the basic social right of everyone to health care, education, a good-paying job and a secure retirement.
There is an objective logic to the development of the class struggle. The struggles in individual workplaces and communities are bringing workers into ever more direct conflict with the anti-working class trade unions, requiring the formation of independent factory and workplace committees to unify broader sections of the working class.
Strike action in the US hits a 32-year high
The number of workers participating in strike action in the US during 2018 reached the highest level in 32 years, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report issued Friday morning in Washington. The figures document the rise in the class struggle in the course of the year, spearheaded by public school teachers who rebelled against their unions and carried out statewide strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona.
The BLS report identified 20 major labor disputes, defined as strikes or lockouts involving at least 1,000 workers. It was the largest number of such actions since 2007, when there were 21 strikes or lockouts of that size.
More than 485,000 workers staged walkouts during the year, with the vast majority of these being teachers and other school workers, including 86,000 in Arizona, 45,000 in Oklahoma, 35,000 in West Virginia and 26,000 in Kentucky, all in protracted battles with their state governments, as well as 123,000 in North Carolina and 63,000 in Colorado, who were limited to one-day strikes.
Teachers on strike in West Virginia
The total number of workers involved was the largest since 1986, when 533,000 workers engaged in major strikes or lockouts. The 2.8 million work days lost to strikes or lockouts in 2018 were the most since 2004.
Of the 20 major walkouts, eight were by teachers, including the six statewide actions and local strikes in Jersey City, New Jersey and Tacoma, Washington. Five strikes were by health care workers in Rhode Island, Vermont and California; two by telecommunications workers; two by hotel workers and two by construction workers. One was the lockout of workers at National Grid, a New England-based gas utility. Not a single major strike took place in manufacturing.
The figures released by the BLS raise a number of important historical and political issues.
While far higher than the average of the past 20 years, the 2.8 million work days lost in 2018 is a lower figure than for any year from 1947 through 1999. This figure rose as high as 60 million in 1959, the year of a 116-day industry-wide steel strike, and never fell below 10 million until 1982, the year after the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike.
In the rest of that decade, work days lost to strike action exceeded 10 million only in 1983, 1986 and 1989, remaining well below that figure throughout the 1990s, as the unions systematically smothered or betrayed struggles by workers. There were 20 million work days lost in 2000, a number inflated by a six-month strike by 135,000 commercial television actors, most of whom worked only infrequently, but the figure plunged to 1.1 million in 2001 and 659,000 in 2002, before declining to the all-time low of 124,000 in 2009, the year after the Wall Street crash.
The most important revelation in the strike statistics—and one on which the media reports sparked by the BLS announcement are entirely silent—is the contradiction between the rising curve of worker militancy and the continued efforts by the unions to strangle the class struggle.
Of the six conflicts in 2018 with the largest impact in terms of work days lost, only one, against the Marriott hotel chain, was called by the unions. Four were statewide teachers’ strikes initiated by the rank-and-file on their own, using social media—in West Virginia (525,000 work days lost), Arizona (486,000), Oklahoma (405,000) and Kentucky (182,000). A fifth was the lockout imposed on utility workers at National Grid by the employer (156,000 work days lost).
Of the 2.8 million work days lost in labor disputes in 2018, nearly two-thirds were not the result of strikes called by the unions. They emerged organically out of the workplace and the conflict between the workers and employers. If it had been up to the unions, these struggles would never have taken place.
The upsurge of the working class in 2018 did not represent a revival of the unions, but a rebellion of the working class against them. These organizations have become a straitjacket, not only in politics—with the decades-long subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party—but in the assertion of even the most elementary class interests of workers for decent wages, working conditions and health and retirement benefits.
The initial struggles of the working class in 2019 have already confirmed this assessment. The teachers’ unions betrayed the week-long strike by 33,000 Los Angeles teachers in the most blatant fashion possible, abandoning the most important demands before the strike even began and rushing through a ratification vote in a matter of hours, having broken up the teachers into hundreds of separate meetings to block any organized opposition.
At the same time, the teachers’ unions are repeating the same policy as in 2018, when they kept the statewide strikes separated month-by-month so as to prevent the emergence of a nationwide strike by educators against budget cuts, low pay and increasing class sizes. While Los Angeles teachers were on the picket line last month, the unions delayed strikes in Oakland, Denver and the state of Virginia. These strikes too, should they break out, will be staggered in time and deliberately separated from one another.
Even more blatant is the deliberate silence of all the American trade unions, and particularly the United Auto Workers, on the heroic struggle by 70,000 auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. These workers defied their unions to launch strike action, which has won substantial pay raises and bonuses at most of the auto parts plants, while inspiring other workers in the Mexico-US border region to launch their own strikes demanding similar increases.
The UAW and the other American unions have ample reason—from the standpoint of the millionaire bureaucrats who head them—to censor any news of the Matamoros struggle. The workers there have rebelled against the unions, denouncing them as corporate stooges, elected strike committees of rank-and-file workers to lead their struggle, and defied local, state and national government threats of police repression.
It is the nightmare of every union official that American workers will see the Mexican workers’ struggle as an example to be followed. This is particularly true of the UAW and its counterpart in Canada, Unifor, which have made anti-Mexican chauvinism a central feature of their politics, blaming plant shutdowns and layoffs, like the current shutdowns threatened in Detroit, Lordstown, Ohio and Oshawa, Ontario, on workers south of the Rio Grande.
It is in order to assert and demonstrate the fundamental unity of the struggles of the working class—in the US, Canada, Mexico and throughout the world—that the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees and the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter are holding a demonstration today at 2 pm outside General Motors headquarters in downtown Detroit to fight the GM plant closings and layoffs.
We urge auto workers and other workers in the Detroit area and throughout the Midwest to join this rally, take up its call to establish rank-and-file committees independent of the unions, and build a mass movement of the working class to defend jobs, wages and working conditions on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
“People are tired of not being able to pay their bills while the rich eat filet mignon”
As global jobs massacre continues, workers around the world voice support for fight against plant closures
continuing to receive statements of support for the February 9 demonstration in Detroit against General Motors plant closings called by the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees and the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter.
This week GM began the mass layoff of 4,250 salaried workers in North America. This follows the announcement that it will close five plants in the US and Canada, including assembly plants in Oshawa, Ontario, Lordstown, Ohio and the Detroit-Hamtramck facility in Michigan. At the same time, Ford will eliminate a shift April 1 at its Flat Rock Assembly Plant south of Detroit, impacting some 1,000 workers.
Anger is mounting over the job cuts that will have a devastating impact on communities ravaged by deindustrialization. Autoworkers, students and community residents have given statements of support for the demonstration, both from across the US and internationally.
Alex works at the Fiat Chrysler Trenton Engine Plant south of Detroit and has been closely following the developments of workers struggles in Matamoros, supporting the call for a unified fight of US, Canadian, and Mexican workers.
Alex said he supported the February 9 demonstration against GM’s planned plant closures. “People are tired of not being able to pay their bills while the rich eat filet mignon. The way things are going, I think we’re going to see in this country either a civil war or revolution break out.”
When asked about tactics employed by Unifor union in Canada and the United Auto Workers in the US to divide workers by promoting nationalism, Alex responded, “This is what they’ve been doing for at least the last two decades! I keep telling the younger workers here that the union is not fighting for us. The younger generation especially really has to wake up and recognize what’s happening to them. They try to keep these younger workers in the dark and get them to think that this is just the way things are and that the union is actually representing them.”
He was also highly supportive of the call for workers to organize outside of the unions through rank-and-file committees.
“Look at the workers in [Matamoros] Mexico, or what’s happening in France,” he said, referring to the ongoing Yellow Vest protests. “People are out on the streets against their corrupt governments and against the rich.”
A worker from heavy equipment maker John Deere wrote, “I support the February 9 demonstration and urge workers internationally to support it as well.
“The UAW has not called a national strike for over 30 years. Why? What happened? I remember when I first started working at John Deere in the 90s. They told us not to talk to the older workers. Why? Because they didn’t want us to understand what the unions used to be like. They didn’t want us to get any ideas about going on strike. They definitely don’t want a general strike, which I think needs to happen today.
“This was also around the time they introduced the two-tier system. The UAW told us we had to make a sacrifice to keep John Deere afloat. Well, John Deere is doing just fine and we’re still paying for it, just like the autoworkers.”
The WSWS has also received messages of support from workers internationally, who are watching with interest the fight by US autoworkers.
A rail worker in Britain wrote, “I send solidarity from the rail workers in the UK who currently face similar struggles in the face of increased automation within our own networks. The unions, which are supposed to represent us, are showing increasing hostility towards the rank-and-file.
“I have been victimized over stands that have been made against DOO [driver only operated trains], which the Conservative UK government is introducing on the railways in Britain. This goes against the safety of passengers, shows a complete disregard for the vulnerable onboard trains and is about helping to increase profits for the companies running them.
“Anyone who seems opposed to this is in line for being targeted, being singled out and being victimized, and the unions seem happy to allow this to happen with no protest. Attacks on UK rail workers are now commonplace, and we have shown in certain circles that getting the rank-and-file briefed, told the truth about union sellouts and exposing the closed-door deals behind our backs is how we make a stand against it all.
“Like you, we face up to 20,000 job losses if these diabolical plans are introduced. Sellouts have taken place by the unions and been exposed and current struggles are taking place on many networks.
“Protests such as yours are key to highlighting to the world that these fights are real, these fights are winnable and the break away from the unions is essential to completing the task worldwide. I wish you good luck and never give up. You need to be organized and stand up to the oppressing regime in order to succeed.”
A metal worker from Turkey, sent the following message, “We support your fight against factory closures by GM and the February 9 demonstration in Detroit. In Turkey, we follow both the struggle by 70,000 Matamoros workers and fight against GM only through the WSWS. We want to thank the WSWS for being the only political media organ of the international working class. This is a fact that many workers are beginning to understand.
“Almost three years ago, thousands of automotive/metal workers in Turkey launched wildcat strikes against the companies (Renault, Fiat, Ford and others) and their trade unions. It was part of the first steps of an international rebellion against the pro-capitalist trade unions. These workers and other sections of the working class follow your inspiring struggles via the WSWS.
“We have a common enemy in the capitalist class all over the world and have to unite against them internationally. For that, we must develop our political independence from the trade unions and establishment parties and build our own international socialist party and rank-and-file committees in our workplaces and connect them internationally.”
A student from China attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor wrote, “I support the workers demonstration in Detroit because I believe that working class is the true revolutionary class. When I came to learn about the living and working conditions of working class here, I found that they are not in any sense different from the plight that workers in China face.
“Even more, the methods used by the counterrevolutionaries are not different either. I support the workers’ struggle in Detroit because I see this not as a regional or national question, but a step and an integrated part in the broader international struggle of the working class against the already globalized capitalist system.”
The WSWS also received a statement of support from Florlisa Fowler, a Flint resident who played a prominent role in organizing opposition to the lead poisoning of the city’s water supply.
She said, “As someone who has lived in Flint all of my life and felt the full impact of GM, and the UAW on the families in Flint … it is time to take a stand against what they have been doing to the working class—the constant threat to jobs, cutbacks when they are making a steady profit off the backs of the workers, the poor conditions at many of the plants, not to mention the different tiers of pay they have created which hurts and divides the workers.
“When the auto companies moved our jobs, the UAW did nothing to stop it. Ever since the UAW got control of that VEBA (retiree health care trust fund), they have been part of the companies.
“Workers from all areas of the world must stand together or this not only will continue, it will get far worse!”
Cascade of plant closings in New York state
Social costs mount
In the past five months the workers in the Upstate New York region have faced an unrelenting attack on their jobs, as several plants, including a massive GM plant in Rochester, have announced that they are closing or carrying out cuts, with some moving production to exploit cheaper labor elsewhere.
Upstate New York cities along the Erie Canal that were once booming have suffered heavily from job losses. This has resulted in conditions where around one out every two young people are poor in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, and even Albany, where one out of three children are poverty-stricken according to the Census Bureau 2017 statistics.
The social consequences have been devastating. A recent house fire in Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo, is just one example. The fire severely injured a woman who has been placed in a medically induced coma, while her adult son, a disabled former Marine, perished in the blaze. There were reports that their utilities had been shut off in August, likely for non-payment, which forced them to utilize their fireplace, the likely source of the fire.
On January 22 Ingersoll Rand in Cheektowaga, New York announced that 300 workers would lose their jobs at the industrial air compressor maker when it closes in July of this year.
The Ingersoll workers are affiliated with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union (IAM), which has not said a word about opposing the plant closure.
Buffalo’s Democratic Congressman Brian Higgins said in a press release, “We are experiencing firsthand the failed promises of the GOP tax bill.” However, it should be noted that the decimation of jobs in this region has taken place under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Corporations that received millions in subsidies and grants will simply pull up stakes, leaving impoverished communities to deal with the consequences.
For example, on December 27 Globe Metallurgical announced the closing and sacking of 100 of its employees at their silicon for solar panels manufacturing plant in Niagara Falls. This was after generous subsidies worth millions of dollars in nearly free electric power from the Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station, owned by the quasi-public New York Power Authority. This was all predicated on the company’s empty promise to bring 500 jobs to the region.
This past November came the sudden announcement of the layoff of 219 workers at the New Era sports apparel plant in Derby, New York. The privately owned company plans to close the manufacturing plant that produces caps at the end of this March. The workers in Buffalo produce caps for the public, pro sports, and are the official suppliers for Major League Baseball. The company was founded in Buffalo in the 1920s and has many long-term employees. At its height, in the first decade of this century, the plant employed over 600 workers and currently boasts of sales to over 80 countries.
Starting this past January, the union at New Era, Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 14177, has been protesting the closing at the company’s headquarters in Buffalo. However, the CWA has not made a serious call for any workers, including those in the Buffalo region’s three other auto plants, or in nearby Canadian auto and auto parts plants, to unite and fight against the attacks.
The average wage at New Era is $17 per hour according to Buffalo News. The company reportedly has around $750 million in annual revenue and bought the naming rights to the Buffalo Bills football stadium in a reported seven-year $40 million agreement in 2016.
There were 350 workers with the CWA at New Era’s former plant in Demopolis, Alabama, and with another 700 employed in that state at another facility in Jackson when the company ended operations there in 2010.
Production in Buffalo is being partly moved to Miami, Florida to exploit cheaper labor, in an effort to honor the terms of their Major League Baseball (MLB) contract that requires it to produce at least 2 percent of its equipment in the US.
The company has announced that there will be severance packages, though this has not alleviated the near impossibility of finding comparable employment in the economically devastated upstate New York region.
In Rochester this past August, General Motors announced cuts of 600 jobs at their former Delphi parts plant, which was spun off and repurchased by GM and reorganized under its wholly owned subsidiary, General Motors Component Holdings (GMCH).
There are a total of 866 hourly workers at the factory, but workers who spoke with this writer said that it could close sooner than the announced 2021 date. The United Auto Workers Local 1097 shop chairman Todd Campanella spoke with local media and said of the closing, “The rails and injectors are what the company announced they are giving to an outside supplier now.” And added in a groveling tone, “They should want to be able to do work in our plant. The question is whether [GM] wants to help us get more work.”
The twists and turns in ownership of the plant served to usher in lower tiers with lower wages and benefits. The UAW has not lifted a finger to oppose any of these attacks on workers’ standards of living.
In another blow, the tech startup Bak USA, a tablet and laptop electronics maker, closed operations in Buffalo and immediately laid off its 77 remaining employees November 1.
The list of industrial companies that have left or downsized in the Buffalo area include American Axle, Republic Steel, Bethlehem Steel, which had 20,000 workers at its height in the mid-sixties, and a shutdown of operations in 1982.
In February of 2018, the Dresser-Rand plant in rural Wellsville, which is southeast of Buffalo, announced the layoff 250 workers and the transfer of their jobs to North Carolina. The company is owned by Siemens AG of Nuremberg, Germany and is selling this one plant out of three it has in the Southern Tier of New York to Curtiss-Wright. The plant will remain open per agreement for the next two years, to aid in the transition, and to keep one of its largest customers—the US Navy—supplied with valves and steam turbines for aircraft carriers and other ships.
The reality of capitalism: GM makes $11.8 billion in profits while closing plants, eliminating 14,000 jobs
7 February 2019
General Motors made $11.8 billion in profits in 2018, according to a company statement released yesterday. This included $10.8 billion in North American earnings last year and a 9.5 percent profit margin in the final quarter. These giant profits were announced as GM accelerates it plans to shut five factories in the US and Canada and destroy more than 14,000 jobs.
GM’s corporate board initiated the jobs massacre two days before the release of the profit report, which showed an eight percent decline over last year’s profits. The aim is to reassure Wall Street that GM will not bow to popular outrage over the plant closings and mass layoffs.
On Monday, the first of 4,000 engineers, technicians, managers and other white-collar workers, including 1,300 workers at the GM Tech Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren, were laid off and escorted out of their work locations. The half-century old Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant is scheduled to be closed next month. The Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant is to be closed on June 1, and the Oshawa, Ontario plant shut down by the fourth quarter of 2019. The company also plans to close transmission plants in Baltimore and Warren by April 1 and August 1, respectively.
In 1979, during the first Chrysler bankruptcy, the corporations and the United Auto Workers (UAW) claimed that huge wage and benefit concessions were needed to “save” the auto industry. After three decades of endless givebacks, the UAW made the same claims as it collaborated with the Obama administration to slash wages during the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler.
Now, even as the auto companies are flush with cash, the corporations are demanding even more sacrifices from workers and handing over billions to Wall Street.
Since 2015, GM squandered $10.6 billion on stock buybacks to boost the value of the company’s shares, more than double the $4.5 billion GM is expected to save next year from the job cuts.
Billions more have been spent on dividend payments to wealthy shareholders. This means even greater personal fortunes for top GM investors like Warren Buffett, the world’s third richest man (net worth $84.4 billion) whose Berkshire Hathaway owns 52.4 million GM shares, and Paul Schwarzman (net worth $12.4 billion) whose BlackRock investment firm controls 79 million GM shares.
In a conference call Wednesday, GM CEO Mary Barra told representatives from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and other investment firms that company executives would “continue to deliver on our commitments that we made to you, our owners” to “create value in the short-term and long-term for our shareholders.”
Workers in the US, Canada, Korea and Brazil are thrown onto the streets, their communities are destroyed, and the profits they have produced are handed over to the financial aristocracy that lords over society.
Workers are being given an object lesson in the nature of capitalism. While the working class produces all of society’s wealth, the product of its labor is owned by the ruling class, which funnels vast sums into the hands of super-rich minority, while workers are condemned to poverty, servitude and social misery.
Predictably, no one on the investors’ call raised any objections to the devastation that would be wrought by the plant closings and mass layoffs. One analyst from Swiss-based UBS, however, did express concern about the “enormous push back” against the plant closings. He asked Barra, “How much of the $4.5 billion in savings is at risk if the unions don’t allow the closings or concessions?”
The GM CEO quickly assured him, saying, “I don’t see any risks,” making it clear the UAW had already signed off on closing what she said were underutilized plants. While the status of the plants would be finalized in negotiations with the UAW for a new labor agreement this summer, she said, “it’s a transition we have to go through” and “problem solve with the UAW.”
Far from fighting the plant closings, the UAW and the Unifor union in Canada have actively supported the decimation of autoworkers’ jobs and living standards. A substantial portion of the wages and benefits stolen from workers has found its way into the bank accounts and investment portfolios of the union executives themselves. When GM announced the plant closings in November, the value of GM shares controlled by the UAW increased by more than $200 million.
Facing the growing militancy of workers, the unions, discredited by decades of betrayals and bribery, are blaming the plant closings on Mexican workers for supposedly stealing the jobs of US and Canadian workers, echoing the nationalist rantings of the Trump administration.
This lie has been exploded by the courageous and ongoing struggle of Mexican workers in the “maquiladora” sweatshops in Matamoros. The workers have waged a three-week battle after rebelling against the unions, forming independent strike committees and calling popular assemblies to fight for improved wages and conditions.
Free from the stranglehold of the unions, these workers marched to the US border at Brownsville, Texas and appealed to their American brothers and sisters to join the fight against the global corporations. The struggle has now spread to grocery store workers, public employees and other sections of workers in Matamoros, with business publications warning about the spreading “contagion” of the class struggle.
The reemergence of the class struggle and political radicalization of the working class has struck fear in the hearts of the ruling class. Terrified that the growth of working-class struggle will acquire a conscious, anti-capitalist perspective, President Trump declared in his State of the Union Tuesday night: “We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country.” His warning received the approval of the assembled representatives of the ruling class, Democrat and Republican, who hoped their clapping hands might stop the wave of working-class anger spreading throughout the country and internationally.
The answer to GM’s job massacre is the demonstration on Saturday, February 9, called by the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees and the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, to mobilize working class opposition to GM’s plant closings and mass layoffs. The march will oppose the supposed “right” of GM to shut down these plants.
The demonstration is not an appeal to GM and its corporate executives, beholden to Wall Street, but a call for workers to express their independent strength and determination to fight. It is also not an appeal to the UAW, the cheap-labor contractor and industrial police force, but is based on the call for auto workers and other workers to form independent rank-and-file committees to organize and unify their struggles.
The demonstration will demand a halt to all plant closures, the abolition of the two-tier wage and benefit system, the transformation of all temporary workers into full-timers, and the rehiring of all laid-off and victimized workers. In opposition to the shop floor dictatorship of corporate management, it will fight for industrial democracy, workers’ control of production and the transformation of GM, Ford and the other auto giants into public enterprises, democratically controlled and collectively owned by the working class.
This program is a critical part of the socialist transformation of world economy, to make social need and equality, not the accumulation of grotesque levels of personal wealth, the guiding principle of economic, political and social life.
Jobs bloodbath at Ford and GM
Ford announces 1,000 job cuts as GM begins mass layoffs
US automakers began their jobs bloodbath on Monday as General Motors started dismissing 4,250 engineers, technicians, managers and other white-collar workers and the news emerged that Ford will eliminate the second shift at its Flat Rock, Michigan assembly plant by April 1, wiping out more than 1,000 hourly jobs.
GM plans to close five factories in the US and Canada, including major assembly plants in Detroit, Lordstown, Ohio and Oshawa, Ontario, and destroy more than 14,000 production and salaried workers’ jobs.
Ford workers leave after a shift change in Chicago
In response, autoworkers and their supporters are preparing a demonstrationthis Saturday in front of the GM headquarters in downtown Detroit. “We are determined that workers are not going to be the forgotten men and women,” said Jerry White, the editor of the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, in response to the layoff announcement.
“No matter whether white collar or blue collar, all workers are part of the 90 percent of society that are the victims of corporate capitalism gone rampant,” he added.
Workers left the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan carrying their belongings. The worker carrying the houseplant said she had been laid off Monday.
“The latest round of mass layoffs is another testament to the betrayal at the hands of the corporate stooges who run the United Auto Workers.” White said. “The 40 years since the first concessions contract at Chrysler have made clear that their actions are not an accumulation of mistakes, but a deliberate policy of imposing the dictates of management on the workers.
“We are calling this demonstration as the first step in the mobilization of the working class throughout the United States, North America and the world in defense of workers’ social rights."
Throughout Monday, white collar workers at the GM Tech Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren and other locations were called into meetings and told whether or not this would be their last day of work. Workers left the front door of the complex with personal possessions, including office supplies and indoor plants. The refrain, “I lost my job,” was heard over and over.
“The situation was tense inside,” one worker told the WSWS. “We read about the layoffs in the Detroit Free Press but nobody knew who was going to be hit.” Another said, “It was horrible and there are going to be more tomorrow.”
Workers leave the GM tech center in Warren
Throughout the day, workers posted anonymous statements on thelayoff.com. “I was one of those that was escorted out and I asked why. No answer could be provided other than: a vague: it's a rough decision, business reasons, nothing personal. etc. I always had great performance reviews, I knew nobody was safe, but I was not expecting this. Some people let go today had over 20 years with General Motors. It's sad. It's the end of the road here.”
“We've watched it countless times over two decades, people walked out like criminals,” another post said. “Box in hand, walk you out to your car. I guess reality hits people sooner than others.”
Last November, GM announced that it was eliminating more than 6,000 production jobs and another 8,000 white-collar jobs this year to save $6 billion by 2020. After more than half of those offered exit packages refused to be pressured into “voluntary retirement,” the company moved ahead with the mass firings.
This week’s layoffs were launched in advance of Wednesday’s release of GM’s 2018 profit report, which is expected to show a reduction from the $11.9 billion the company made in 2017. The timing of the firings is designed to reassure Wall Street that company executives are determined to accelerate their brutal cost-cutting.
The scheduled plant closings are at the same time being used as blackmail to extract major concessions from 154,000 GM, Ford and Chrysler workers whose four-year labor agreements expire in September.
Even as white collar GM workers were being marched out of the Tech Center and other locations, a local ABC News affiliate in Detroit reported that Ford sent a notification on January 25 to the Michigan state government of a “mass layoff” of 1,012 workers planned for April 1 at the Flat Rock Assembly Plant in the downriver suburbs of Detroit. More than 3,500 hourly workers currently build the luxury Lincoln Navigator SUV and Mustang sports car at the Flat Rock plant.
The company, which last month reported North American profits of $3.7 billion in 2018, is carrying out a restructuring of its global operations, which could affect 25,000 or more workers in Europe, Latin America and the US. This includes the shutdown of plants and mass layoffs in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Russia. Last month, the layoff of 12 workers at a Ford Brazil factory sparked a wildcat strike, forcing the company to rehire the workers.
According to a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining) notice, the Flat Rock layoff would be “indefinite” and would affect 560 hourly nonskilled workers, 440 hourly nonskilled temporary workers and 12 salaried employees. A Ford spokesman claimed that while full-time workers would be offered transfers, likely to the Livonia Transmission plant, temporary workers, some who have worked at the company for years, are not eligible to transfer.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) made it clear that it would do nothing to oppose the shift elimination at the Flat Rock plant. UAW Vice President Rory Gamble told the Free Press, “We have been informed by Ford that due to sales, there will be scheduled work reductions at the Flat Rock, Michigan and Louisville, Kentucky plants. Our collectively bargained contract provides for the placement of all members displaced by the shift reduction and, after working with Ford, we are confident that all impacted employees will have the opportunity to work at nearby facilities.”
Gamble said nothing about the fate of the hundreds of temporary part-time workers, who are forced to pay dues to the UAW but have absolutely no rights. In the last UAW-Ford agreement, the union sanctioned a vast increase in the number of these low-paid disposable workers.
Ford Flat Rock workers contacted by the WSWS expressed skepticism that they would, in fact, be able to transfer. There were also concerns about keeping their seniority if they did move to the transmission plant. Workers also expressed concern about TPT (temporary part-time) workers at the Livonia plant who would likely be fired to make way for full-time workers.
The mass layoffs underscore the bankruptcy and betrayal of the UAW and the Unifor union in Canada, which have claimed for decades that wage and benefit concessions would “save” jobs. The unions, which function as the industrial police force for the auto companies, have opposed any genuine fight against the plant closings and mass layoffs. Instead they are peddling economic nationalism, blaming Mexican and Chinese workers for the layoffs, even as tens of thousands of workers in Matamoros, Mexico are fighting the same globally organized corporations.
The February 9 demonstration, sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter and the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees, will call for the building of factory committees, independent of the United Auto Workers and the Unifor union in Canada, to unite workers throughout the US, Canada and Mexico with workers throughout the world to fight the plant closings and mass layoffs.
The demonstration will begin at 2:00 pm EST. GM headquarters is located at 300 Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, Michigan. To sign up for updates, go to wsws.org/auto.
GM Starts Laying Off Thousands of American Workers
Executives at General Motors (GM) have started laying off American workers in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, Georgia, and Texas, while the multinational corporation is reportedly expanding production in China and Mexico.
In what insiders are calling “Black Monday,” American workers at GM — those in factory, financial, and other white-collar jobs — have started being laid off by the corporation with workers posting firsthand accounts online.
The Monday layoffs of at least 4,000 GM white-collar American workers in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, Georgia, and Texas is just the latest component of the corporation’s laying off of 14,700 workers in North America — including at least 3,300 American factory workers.
This year, GM is stopping production at four American plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland. This comes after GM laid off about 1,500 American workers in Lordstown in 2018, while their Mexico production remained unaffected.
Online, American workers experiencing the layoffs are detailing what they are witnessing. A U.S. worker posted about the layoffs at GM’s corporate office in Roswell, Georgia:
Half of Team let go so far. Our team had 25-30 people. So far our 2 managers, all our senior devs, and a handful of NCGs have been let go. A few other key people in our space have been let go as well. We are pretty sure they are dropping our whole org.
One U.S. worker at GM’s Detroit, Michigan Renaissance Center wrote that about 15 employees had been fired all at once in a meeting room nearby. Another worker replied to the post, “Yes. I was one of them.”
A number of U.S. workers at GM said the corporation increased security at all facilities and offices where layoffs are occurring in order to escort those being laid off out of the area.
“Is there really a need for more security? I find that the whole increased security thing is a major overreaction on part of GM,” a U.S. worker posted. “What is it they expect us to do exactly? It just seems like adding insult to injury.”
Similarly, laid-off American workers posted their frustrations that despite their decades-long loyalty to GM, the loyalty was not returned despite the federal government and U.S. taxpayers bailing out the corporation to the sum of more than $13 billion in 2008.
“Loyalty means nothing to GM anymore,” a U.S. worker wrote. “Two decades count for nothing … Escorted out like common criminal … I was naive enough to think I was safe.”
“I was just laid off, promptly escorted off the property, I’ve spent 18 years with GM and all gone in a snap,” a U.S. worker at GM’s Grand Blanc Township, Michigan office wrote, continuing:
I was one of those that was escorted out and I asked why. No answer could be provided other than a vague: It’s a rough decision, business reasons, nothing personal. I always had great performance reviews, I knew nobody was safe but I was not expecting this.
Some people let go today had over 20 years with General Motors. It’s sad. It’s the end of the road here. I hope I bounce back quickly but I was 1000% invested in GM (professionally, emotionally and financially – this will change now).
A U.S. worker at GM’s Warren Tech Center in Warren, Michigan wrote that he was the “last man standing” of his “entire project team.”
“The entire project team I am on was walked out one at a time today,” he wrote. “Just waiting for my cardboard box. I wish my name had come up sooner so I could be enjoying a beer now.”
Another worker in Warren, Michigan wrote that he was called into a conference room two hours before posting about the layoff online. He said GM managers and human resource executives had him “sign a separation agreement” before being given his severance package.
“Whole thing only took about 20 minutes,” he wrote. “Turned in my laptop and badge and headed straight to the closest bar. Had lunch now am drinking heavily. Expect to stay here until they close. Turned off my phone. Not a good day.”
Some speculated why the layoffs were occurring at the beginning of February.
“I noticed in the paper it said GM wanted to do this before the quarterly earnings were released,” a U.S. worker posted. “I bet they had a really good quarter and it would have looked really bad for them to release all of these people which at the same time reporting big profits.”
Others slammed GM CEO Mary Barra who has continued raking in about $22 million a year despite laying off thousands of Americans and outsourcing production to China and Mexico.
“The actions from the top are SICKENING! Where is [Mary Barra] today? Come and get a front row seat for your ‘show,'” a U.S. worker wrote. “Open seating, escorting people to [conference] rooms, buses, metro cars escorting people out. Sad and sick. This MASS termination could have been prevented. [Mary Barra] needs to STEP DOWN!!! Don’t preach integrity [Mary Barra]. Don’t ask for people to work casual overtime. Same as 2008, this could have been handled in a better way.”
A U.S. worker who started at GM in 2000 in his early 20’s recalled how the corporate culture had dramatically changed and how he would miss his job after being laid off.
When I started out it was the year 2000, I was a technician and listened carefully to the engineering teams that had the experience and expertise, that is how I learned, by closing my mouth.
Also learning from the other technicians that were around my age or a bit older than me. I had a lot of respect for all of the engineering guys and the stories they had, almost all of them drag racers or one guy was a cheif engineer and broke land speed records at Bonnevilles salt flats, I was 24 at the time and I have fond memories from those days.
My experience is you really have to ignore all of the distractions going on in the company and keep your nose to the grindstone, anything else is just wasted energy. Listen to everyone of all ages, I’m a car guy and passionate about automotive, listening to the guys and the stories they had from all age groups really lit the fire for me.
I’m in my 40s now, GM is what I basically grew up with and now I’m out of a job for the first time in my life, I hate it because I’ve never not worked. Point is no one is safe no matter how good you are, we all know that there is no guarantee in life, it’s a crapshoot, I miss my work a lot and this just sucks big time. I made it through the bankruptcy in [2008] but this time not so lucky.
While GM lays off thousands of American workers, its production in Mexico and China is ramping up. Specifically, GM is looking to manufacture an electric Cadillac in China and continue manufacturing its Envision compact vehicle in China.
The made-in-Mexico Chevrolet Blazer will soon arrive in U.S. markets. Last year, GM became the largest automaker in Mexico last year as it has cut jobs in America and increased production to Mexico.
Offshoring production out of the U.S. to Mexico has proven cheaper for GM executives, as American workers earn $30 an hour while Mexican workers earn about $3 an hour, a 90 percent cut to wages that widens the corporation’s profit margins.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union is now urging American consumers to boycott GM vehicles that are manufactured in Mexico, noting that such products’ Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) begin with the number “3.”
“Companies like General Motors have an obligation to build where they sell and stop exporting jobs abroad,” UAW President Gary Jones said in a statement. “After all, we invested in General Motors in their darkest days. Now they need to invest in us.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
DON'T BUY INTO IT!
UAW IS A CORRUPT AS THEY COME AND HAVE LONG BEEN DOOR MATS TO GM AS THEY PARTNER TO FUCK OVER THE AMERICAN WORKER.
UAW Invokes Trump’s ‘Buy American,’ Urges Boycott of GM’s Outsourcing to Mexico
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union is invoking President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” platform in its efforts to urge consumers to boycott GM for outsourcing U.S. manufacturing and American jobs to Mexico, China, and Poland.
Since GM executives announced the multinational corporation would lay off 14,700 workers in North America — including at least 3,300 American factory workers — the UAW is hitting back, invoking Trump’s economic nationalist agenda of “Buy American, Hire American.”
“The President has taken important steps to adhere to the concept that the U.S. government and consumers should Buy American,” UAW President Gary Jones said in a statement. “When consumers invest in the products of U.S. workers, we each make an investment in all of us.”
“And it’s not just government,” Jones said. “Companies like General Motors have an obligation to build where they sell and stop exporting jobs abroad. After all, we invested in General Motors in their darkest days. Now they need to invest in us.”
In 2019, GM will stop production at four American plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland. This comes after GM laid off about 1,500 American workers in Lordstown in 2018, while their Mexico production remained unaffected.
Next week, at least 4,000 American GM white-collar workers are set to be laid off. At the same time, GM CEO Mary Barra continues raking in about $22 million a year.
Meanwhile, GM is ramping up production of electric cars in China and offshoring its American workforce overseas, where the corporation will be able to cut hundreds of millions in labor costs to widen their profit margins.
In Poland, GM builds the Buick Cascada coupe but sells the vehicle in the U.S. Similarly, GM is manufacturing its Buick Envision compact SUV and Cadillac CT6 sedan in China while manufacturing the Chevrolet Cruze, the Chevrolet Equinox SUV, the Chevrolet Trax compact SUV, the Chevrolet Silverado, the GMC Sierra, the Chevrolet Blazer SUV, and the GMC Terrain SUV all in Mexico.
In a new ad campaign, the UAW is slamming GM for their outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs and U.S. manufacturing, urging American consumers to boycott all GM products manufactured in China and Mexico.
“As profit and Wall Street shareholder gains soared and as other automakers retooled and invested in the U.S., GM started pulling investments from the U.S.,” the ad states. “Now after making $12 billion last year, GM is ripping the rug out from under the communities, the taxpayers, and the workers that invested in them.”
“GM is making a choice to put enormous profits and Wall Street ahead of American workers, but they don’t have to,” the ad continues. “UAW members and American taxpayers invested in GM and saved the company, now it’s GM’s turn to invest in us.”
The Canadian auto workers union Unifor will run their ad against GM’s outsourcing to Mexico, China, and Poland during the Superbowl. That ad slams GM, stating “You may have forgotten our generosity, but we’ll never forget your greed. You want to sell here. Build here,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
In addition to the video ad, the UAW has put up a series of billboards around the Detroit area, urging GM to remain in the U.S. and asking consumers to boycott the corporation’s Chinese, Mexican, and Polish-made vehicles.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
WALL STREET, GLOBALIST, BILLIONAIRES and the OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATES FINISH OFF MIDDLE-AMERICA.
Ryan asked how much longer will the working-class not matter “because it’s becoming impossible for them to keep their nose above water.”
“Where’s the social compact that we used to have between corporations and their workers? Where’s the social contract between the government and our workers?” asked Ryan. “I mean, it’s like the worker — there’s always an excuse that the worker is going to get hammered, that they’re going to lose their pensions, they’re going to lose their jobs, they’re going to have to move. Meanwhile, corporations, in this instance, General Motors got $157 million in tax cut just last year. I mean how much longer are we going to do this to where the worker doesn’t matter? And I hope this is a real wake-up call for us to say, workers, white, brown, black, gay, straight, working-class people have got to come together because it’s becoming impossible for them to keep their nose above water anymore.” REP. TIM RYAN
GENERAL MOTORS DUMPS THOUSANDS OF WORKERS AND CLOSES PLANTS - Stockholders celebrate!
"It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e., the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment."
“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documentsa sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”
"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."
GM to lay off 4,250 salaried workers in North America starting Monday
General Motors will begin laying off 4,250 North American salaried workers Monday morning as part of a sweeping restructuring announced in November that includes the closure of five plants and the elimination of 15,000 jobs. The plan includes the destruction of 15 percent of the company’s 54,000 North American salaried jobs.
According to one press report, the jobs massacre will take the form of “rolling layoffs” that will continue until the end of the month. Three assembly plants—Lordstown, Ohio; Detroit-Hamtramck; and Oshawa, Ontario—along with Warren Transmission in Michigan and a propulsion plant in Maryland—are slated to close by the end of the year, devastating entire towns and cities.
One report said that GM management was determined to begin the layoffs before the company releases its fourth quarter 2018 and full year 2018 earnings reports on Wednesday, which are expected to show a drop in profits. This underscores the fact that Wall Street is cracking the whip on GM and the rest of the auto giants to press ahead with cost-cutting and stepped up attacks on the workers in order to drive up stock prices and the speculative profits of the banks, hedge funds and big investors. GM has said the job cuts and plant closings will free up $6 billion in cash, but the automaker has spent $10.6 billion since 2015 buying back its own shares in order to fatten the portfolios of the financial oligarchs.
The cuts have generated enormous anger and opposition among autoworkers in the US and Canada, who have never recovered from job cuts and concessions imposed with the collaboration of the auto unions as part of the Obama administration’s 2009 forced bankruptcy and restructuring of GM. The cuts will further impoverish regions in both the US and Canada that have been ravaged by decades of deindustrialization.
Last month, workers at the Oshawa assembly plant staged a five-hour sit down protest after GM CEO Mary Barra announced that she would not reconsider the decision to close the factory. Workers took the action independently of Unifor, terrifying the union officials and sending them scrambling to quash the rebellion.
February 9 demonstration in Detroit against GM plant closures
The World Socialist Web SiteAutoworker Newsletter and the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees have called a demonstration for February 9 outside GM headquarters in Detroit in opposition to the plant closings. It has called on workers to mobilize independently of the UAW and Unifor to defend their jobs and living standards and link up with the struggle of 70,000 Mexican autoworkers in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, who have been carrying out a wildcat strike for nearly three weeks.
The call has garnered widespread interest and support. A central theme of this action is the unity of US, Mexican and Canadian workers against job cuts and concessions and against all attempts to divide workers along national lines.
This means an implacable struggle against the economic nationalism promoted by the unions. The response of the United Auto Workers and Unifor in Canada to the plant closures is to spew nationalist poison. This week, the United Auto Workers announced that is joining a boycott of GM vehicles assembled in Mexico previously initiated by Unifor.
These same organizations oppose any industrial action by GM workers to fight the layoffs. They plan to use the threat of plant closings to blackmail workers into accepting new concessions that will be demanded by the auto companies in contract negotiations later this year.
The call for a boycott targeting the jobs of Mexican workers is an attempt to divert workers from a struggle against the real enemy—the transnational auto companies and the profit system as a whole—and instead channel their anger against their fellow workers south of the Rio Grande. In this way, the unions line up behind the Trump administration’s fascistic attacks on immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America.
The announcement of the GM closures takes place against a background of growing worker militancy around the word, including strikes by autoworkers in Hungary, yellow vest protests in France, a general strike in India and a walkout by 30,000 teachers in Los Angeles.
Of particular concern to the UAW and Unifor is the strike by the maquiladora workers in Matamoros against sweatshop conditions at auto parts manufacturers and other industries. To this date, the UAW has not said a word about the heroic actions of the Matamoros workers, who launched their strikes independently of and in opposition to the official unions.
A worker at the Ford Sterling Axle plant outside of Detroit told the WSWS in response to the UAW’s call for an anti-Mexican boycott, “It is not the fault of Mexican workers. It is corporate greed. They just want more profits.
“We haven’t heard a word from [UAW President] Gary Jones since he got elected. He doesn’t want to piss off the car companies because he is afraid of losing perks. They are invested in GM through the retiree health care fund.”
Referring to the blackout of reports about the strikes in Matamoros, he said, “They don’t want us to get any ideas. What the Mexican workers are doing is sticking together and saying enough is enough. They don’t want us to find out because they don’t want us raising our own demands.”
A General Motors worker at the Delta Township assembly plant near Lansing, Michigan said he planned to attend the Feb 9 demonstration. “It is not the Mexican workers’ fault. They are trying to provide for their families.
“GM is closing five plants, but they are making record profits. They are trying to force the older workforce to retire by placing them in other plants and making them drive long distances. It leaves them little time for their families. They can’t just relocate and buy new homes. It forces them to retire.
“You haven’t heard anything from the UAW about Canadian plants being closed. We should work on how you hurt them by sticking together. You should have Mexican, Canadian, US workers all united together.”
In another demonstration of the UAW’s lineup with the Trump administration, on Thursday UAW President Gary Jones announced his support for Trump’s executive order titled “Strengthening Buy-American Preferences for Infrastructure Projects.” In a brief statement Jones declared, “Companies like General Motors have an obligation to build where they sell and stop exporting jobs abroad.”
Meanwhile, Unifor says it plans to run ads promoting its anti-Mexican boycott during this Sunday’s Super Bowl football game. These ads are extremely costly, reportedly $5.25 million for a 30 second spot, or roughly the equivalent of the monthly dues contribution of 100,000 workers.
The nationalist “Buy American” and “Made in Canada” campaigns of the UAW and Unifor are both reactionary and absurd. They ignore the global character of production, which makes it impossible to determine the “nationality” of any given vehicle.
After ignoring the strikes in Matamoros for weeks, Unifor President Jerry Dias announced his “support” for striking Mexican autoworkers in a perfunctory statement this week. This followed determined attempts by the establishment media, pseudo-left groups, Unifor and the UAW to black out all news of the strike by Mexican workers.
Black Monday: GM to Layoff 4K American White-Collar Workers
Executives at General Motors (GM) announced Friday that about 4,250 white-collar workers would be laid off, the vast majority of whom are in the United States, as the multinational corporation continues shifting production overseas and to Mexico.
GM executives are set to start the layoffs on Monday of next week, with an investment strategist declaring the day “Black Monday” as thousands of workers in the U.S. and Canada will be terminated from their positions.
“Black Monday at General Motors,” David Kudla wrote online. “To those who are about to separate, we salute you.”
The Monday layoffs of thousands of GM’s white-collar American workers in Michigan and Ohio is just the latest component of the corporation’s laying off of 14,700 workers in North America — including at least 3,300 American factory workers
In 2019, GM expects to stop production at four American plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland. This comes after GM laid off about 1,500 American workers in Lordstown in 2018, while their Mexico production remained unaffected.
Though GM promised to hire recently laid off American workers for jobs at its Fort Wayne, Indiana manufacturing plant, the company has continued employing temporary workers. The United Auto Workers (UAW) is now suing.
Despite the layoffs, GM’s CEO Mary Barra has continued raking in about $22 million a year.
Breitbart News has learned from insiders that layoffs of American workers are to occur at the Warren Tech Center in Warren, Michigan, the GM plant in Pontiac, Michigan, corporate workers at GM’s Austin, Texas office, as well as layoffs at GM’s Detroit, Michigan Renaissance Center.
In message boards, American GM workers raged online, posting in real time their experiences with the mass layoffs.
“Signs on most of the conference rooms in my building already,” one GM worker in Pontiac, Michigan posted. “The signs all say ‘conference room not available, do not enter’ … looks like [layoffs are] happening Monday.”
Another worker wrote that the layoffs will occur “over in the next 2 weeks.”
“Probably not breaking news, but told by a very reliable source it is going to take place over the next 2 weeks, not on just a single day,” the worker wrote.
At GM’s Austin, Texas, offices, a worker wrote on the message board that rumors inside the company indicate about “400+ people will be let go in Austin.”
An American worker not being impacted by GM’s mass layoffs wrote a heartfelt note to those who would soon be laid off by the corporation:
We’ve been aware that this was happening, but on Monday it becomes reality. The company will be a very different place after this, at least in my eyes. Just want to say that my heart goes to the ones that are affected, and my hopes are that you all find new jobs, better jobs. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure working with you, and let us hope that no other company will disappoint you the way GM did.
While GM lays off thousands of American workers, its production in Mexico and China is ramping up. Specifically, GM is looking to manufacture an electric Cadillac in China and continue manufacturing its Envision compact vehicle in China.
“2019 will be a pivotal year for GM — one in which we will see how a 100-year-old auto company takes drastic steps to convert from (internal combustion) to electric,” Kudla wrote. “It’s a huge bet.”
Offshoring production from the U.S. to Mexico and China has proven cheaper for GM executives. For example, American workers earn $30 an hour, while Mexican workers earn about $3 an hour, a 90 percent cut to wages that widens the corporation’s profit margins.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
GM Sought to Outsource 2.8K U.S. Jobs to Foreigners While Laying Off Americans
Multinational corporation General Motors (GM) sought to import nearly 2,800 foreign workers in the last three years to take U.S. jobs while laying off American workers.
GM will be laying off at least 4,250 of its white-collar workers in Canada and America — with the vast majority in the U.S. — starting next week.
The layoffs are just a small component of the corporation’s mass layoff scheme of 14,700 workers in North America — including at least 3,300 American factory workers. Meanwhile, GM is ramping up production of electric cars in China.
In 2019, GM expects to stop production at four American plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland. This comes after GM laid off about 1,500 American workers in Lordstown in 2018, while their Mexico production remained unaffected.
At the same time GM has been laying off American workers, the corporation has been importing foreign workers from countries like India, China, Brazil, and South Korea.
Between 2016 and 2018, GM attempted to outsource nearly 700 American jobs in Warren, Michigan, to foreign workers brought in on the H-1B visa. The corporation also tried to outsource 167 U.S. jobs to H-1B foreign workers in Detroit, Michigan, another 154 U.S. jobs in Milford, Michigan, an additional 82 U.S. jobs in Pontiac, Michigan, and about 20 U.S. jobs in Roswell, Georgia.
Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
Last year, alone, U.S. businesses attempted to outsource nearly 420,000 American jobs to foreign workers, a population that exceeds the total population of Tampa, Florida.
The U.S. high-paying jobs GM outsourced to foreign workers while laying off American workers over the last three years include nearly 320 electrical engineering jobs, nearly 320 mechanical engineering jobs, more than 220 software developer jobs, and about 66 commercial and industrial designer jobs.
GM even outsourced nearly 150 U.S. jobs at its financial services wing in Arlington, Fort Worth, and Irving, Texas, as well as financial jobs in Detroit, Michigan, and Charlotte, North Carolina. The vast majority of these foreign workers imported to take these jobs were from India.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union has launched a campaign urging consumers to boycott GM for their offshoring and outsourcing business practices that is leaving thousands of American workers laid off just years after the corporation was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers and received a massive tax cut.
“Companies like General Motors have an obligation to build where they sell and stop exporting jobs abroad,” UAW President Gary Jones said in a statement. “After all, we invested in General Motors in their darkest days. Now they need to invest in us.”
As Breitbart News previously reported, more than 2.7 million H-1B foreign workers have been approved to come to the U.S. to take American jobs between 2007 and 2017. During that same period, businesses tried to outsource almost 3.5 million American jobs to foreign workers instead of hiring Americans.
About four million young Americans enter the workforce each year, many looking for white-collar jobs in the STEM fields. Those Americans’ prospects of finding work are crippled by the country’s legal immigration process, which admits more than 1.5 million immigrants and hundreds of thousands of foreign visa workers annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Teachers on strike in West Virginia
The total number of workers involved was the largest since 1986, when 533,000 workers engaged in major strikes or lockouts. The 2.8 million work days lost to strikes or lockouts in 2018 were the most since 2004.
Of the 20 major walkouts, eight were by teachers, including the six statewide actions and local strikes in Jersey City, New Jersey and Tacoma, Washington. Five strikes were by health care workers in Rhode Island, Vermont and California; two by telecommunications workers; two by hotel workers and two by construction workers. One was the lockout of workers at National Grid, a New England-based gas utility. Not a single major strike took place in manufacturing.
The figures released by the BLS raise a number of important historical and political issues.
While far higher than the average of the past 20 years, the 2.8 million work days lost in 2018 is a lower figure than for any year from 1947 through 1999. This figure rose as high as 60 million in 1959, the year of a 116-day industry-wide steel strike, and never fell below 10 million until 1982, the year after the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike.
In the rest of that decade, work days lost to strike action exceeded 10 million only in 1983, 1986 and 1989, remaining well below that figure throughout the 1990s, as the unions systematically smothered or betrayed struggles by workers. There were 20 million work days lost in 2000, a number inflated by a six-month strike by 135,000 commercial television actors, most of whom worked only infrequently, but the figure plunged to 1.1 million in 2001 and 659,000 in 2002, before declining to the all-time low of 124,000 in 2009, the year after the Wall Street crash.
The most important revelation in the strike statistics—and one on which the media reports sparked by the BLS announcement are entirely silent—is the contradiction between the rising curve of worker militancy and the continued efforts by the unions to strangle the class struggle.
Of the six conflicts in 2018 with the largest impact in terms of work days lost, only one, against the Marriott hotel chain, was called by the unions. Four were statewide teachers’ strikes initiated by the rank-and-file on their own, using social media—in West Virginia (525,000 work days lost), Arizona (486,000), Oklahoma (405,000) and Kentucky (182,000). A fifth was the lockout imposed on utility workers at National Grid by the employer (156,000 work days lost).
Of the 2.8 million work days lost in labor disputes in 2018, nearly two-thirds were not the result of strikes called by the unions. They emerged organically out of the workplace and the conflict between the workers and employers. If it had been up to the unions, these struggles would never have taken place.
The upsurge of the working class in 2018 did not represent a revival of the unions, but a rebellion of the working class against them. These organizations have become a straitjacket, not only in politics—with the decades-long subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party—but in the assertion of even the most elementary class interests of workers for decent wages, working conditions and health and retirement benefits.
The initial struggles of the working class in 2019 have already confirmed this assessment. The teachers’ unions betrayed the week-long strike by 33,000 Los Angeles teachers in the most blatant fashion possible, abandoning the most important demands before the strike even began and rushing through a ratification vote in a matter of hours, having broken up the teachers into hundreds of separate meetings to block any organized opposition.
At the same time, the teachers’ unions are repeating the same policy as in 2018, when they kept the statewide strikes separated month-by-month so as to prevent the emergence of a nationwide strike by educators against budget cuts, low pay and increasing class sizes. While Los Angeles teachers were on the picket line last month, the unions delayed strikes in Oakland, Denver and the state of Virginia. These strikes too, should they break out, will be staggered in time and deliberately separated from one another.
Even more blatant is the deliberate silence of all the American trade unions, and particularly the United Auto Workers, on the heroic struggle by 70,000 auto parts workers in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. These workers defied their unions to launch strike action, which has won substantial pay raises and bonuses at most of the auto parts plants, while inspiring other workers in the Mexico-US border region to launch their own strikes demanding similar increases.
The UAW and the other American unions have ample reason—from the standpoint of the millionaire bureaucrats who head them—to censor any news of the Matamoros struggle. The workers there have rebelled against the unions, denouncing them as corporate stooges, elected strike committees of rank-and-file workers to lead their struggle, and defied local, state and national government threats of police repression.
It is the nightmare of every union official that American workers will see the Mexican workers’ struggle as an example to be followed. This is particularly true of the UAW and its counterpart in Canada, Unifor, which have made anti-Mexican chauvinism a central feature of their politics, blaming plant shutdowns and layoffs, like the current shutdowns threatened in Detroit, Lordstown, Ohio and Oshawa, Ontario, on workers south of the Rio Grande.
It is in order to assert and demonstrate the fundamental unity of the struggles of the working class—in the US, Canada, Mexico and throughout the world—that the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees and the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter are holding a demonstration today at 2 pm outside General Motors headquarters in downtown Detroit to fight the GM plant closings and layoffs.
We urge auto workers and other workers in the Detroit area and throughout the Midwest to join this rally, take up its call to establish rank-and-file committees independent of the unions, and build a mass movement of the working class to defend jobs, wages and working conditions on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
Ford workers leave after a shift change in Chicago
In response, autoworkers and their supporters are preparing a demonstrationthis Saturday in front of the GM headquarters in downtown Detroit. “We are determined that workers are not going to be the forgotten men and women,” said Jerry White, the editor of the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, in response to the layoff announcement.
“No matter whether white collar or blue collar, all workers are part of the 90 percent of society that are the victims of corporate capitalism gone rampant,” he added.
Workers left the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan carrying their belongings. The worker carrying the houseplant said she had been laid off Monday.
“The latest round of mass layoffs is another testament to the betrayal at the hands of the corporate stooges who run the United Auto Workers.” White said. “The 40 years since the first concessions contract at Chrysler have made clear that their actions are not an accumulation of mistakes, but a deliberate policy of imposing the dictates of management on the workers.
“We are calling this demonstration as the first step in the mobilization of the working class throughout the United States, North America and the world in defense of workers’ social rights."
Throughout Monday, white collar workers at the GM Tech Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren and other locations were called into meetings and told whether or not this would be their last day of work. Workers left the front door of the complex with personal possessions, including office supplies and indoor plants. The refrain, “I lost my job,” was heard over and over.
“The situation was tense inside,” one worker told the WSWS. “We read about the layoffs in the Detroit Free Press but nobody knew who was going to be hit.” Another said, “It was horrible and there are going to be more tomorrow.”
Workers leave the GM tech center in Warren
Throughout the day, workers posted anonymous statements on thelayoff.com. “I was one of those that was escorted out and I asked why. No answer could be provided other than: a vague: it's a rough decision, business reasons, nothing personal. etc. I always had great performance reviews, I knew nobody was safe, but I was not expecting this. Some people let go today had over 20 years with General Motors. It's sad. It's the end of the road here.”
“We've watched it countless times over two decades, people walked out like criminals,” another post said. “Box in hand, walk you out to your car. I guess reality hits people sooner than others.”
Last November, GM announced that it was eliminating more than 6,000 production jobs and another 8,000 white-collar jobs this year to save $6 billion by 2020. After more than half of those offered exit packages refused to be pressured into “voluntary retirement,” the company moved ahead with the mass firings.
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