Wall Street to General Motors: End strike and ram through cuts
Shut down the strike by GM workers quickly and force through massive concessions. This was the meaning of a statement this week by credit rating agency Moody’s, which called the strike a “credit-negative” for the company, increasing the likelihood that Moody’s might downgrade GM’s credit.
If the strike is not wrapped up within one to two weeks, Moody’s warned, “the financial burden of a strike will become more material and the prospects of a contract that avoids erosion of the company’s current competitive position is less likely.”
In plain language, it means that if GM and the United Auto Workers cannot shut down the strike quickly and force through major concessions, Wall Street will punish the auto giant by making it more expensive for the company to borrow money and by tanking its stock value.
This demonstrates that striking GM workers are not simply confronting GM CEO Mary Barra and other executives, but the entire capitalist class. Behind GM stands its Wall Street investors, who are demanding that the company do everything to ensure a high rate of profit in the face of what is expected to be a protracted downturn in the auto industry.
This is despite 10 years of near-record profits in the auto industry, which produced a bonanza for GM’s wealthy investors. For the most part, these profits have not been used to invest in new production or emerging technologies. Instead, they have been wasted on stock buybacks, including $10 billion since 2015 alone, and billions more in dividend payments.
One of the beneficiaries of the stock market runup is the UAW, which owns more than $3.7 billion in GM stock through its retiree healthcare fund.
Joe Ashton, former UAW vice president for GM, joined the company’s board of directors in 2014. He resigned in 2017, after the Detroit News first reported his ties to the expanding federal corruption investigation into the UAW. His former top assistant Mike Grimes has since pleaded guilty to extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for contracts from the UAW-GM training center.
Wall Street has already turned the screws on GM’s rivals. On September 9, Moody’s downgraded Ford’s credit rating to junk status in retaliation for the perceived slowness of its “fitness” program—in reality, a jobs massacre.
In May, Ford announced that it would lay off 7,000 salaried workers, or 10 percent of its global white-collar workforce. Investors greeted this with a collective yawn, with some analysts demanding at least 23,000 layoffs, or one-third of the company’s salaried workforce.
In June, Ford announced that it would close five plants throughout Europe and eliminate 12,000 hourly jobs, a 20 percent reduction of its European workforce. But this was too little, too late as far as Moody’s was concerned.
In a Wednesday opinion piece reflecting the mood of investors, the Wall Street Journal wrote that General Motors “is under intense pressure to show it can cruise through the next downturn without too much damage. Only then can the largest U.S. auto maker expect a better stock-market valuation.”
The article states: “Many of the UAW demands seem reasonable, particularly for temporary and other workers who don’t enjoy the same perks as Old Timers. But that is no basis for an agreement.” The Journal continues, “GM’s credibility with investors depends on it maintaining as flexible a cost base as possible.”
In reality, while these are the issues animating rank-and-file autoworkers, the UAW has made no such demands. In fact, it has not made any demands whatsoever, and it continues to keep workers in the dark about the content of its discussions with GM.
This is because the UAW is conspiring with GM to shut down the strike as quickly as possible and force through a concessions-laden contract. The UAW has its own financial incentives to do so. In addition to its ownership of stock in GM, it also wants to avoid draining the $760 million strike fund, which UAW officials use to pay out their bloated six-figure salaries.
“GM may have played hardball in November to leave itself room to compromise now,” the Journal writes. “ Its offer to the union involves giving new projects—its electric pickup truck and, intriguingly, battery cell production—to two of the affected plants. This may hint at a path to a deal.”
This refers to the terms of the proposal by GM, published by the company after the beginning of the strike, which combined promises to eventually reopen Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, which is slated to close in January, as an electric truck plant and build a battery factory near the shuttered Lordstown plant in northeastern Ohio. This would be a fig leaf that would cover up massive concessions, including major out-of-pocket healthcare cost increases and raises below the rate of inflation.
“However,” the Journal warns, “the company can’t afford to stray far down this path. GM has more spare manufacturing capacity than either Ford or Fiat Chrysler, with four plants in addition to the ‘unallocated’ ones that are poorly used, according to LMC Automotive data. ‘GM really didn’t need the factories,’ says LMC analyst Jeff Schuster.”
The article concludes: “Mary Barra is popular on Wall Street, in particular for well-timed decisions to quit Europe and raise $7.25 billion of frothy tech capital for GM’s driverless project. Even so, GM stock fetches just under six times earnings. To cement her reputation, Ms. Barra needs to drive the company successfully through tougher times. Investors can expect her to fight hard for GM’s flexibility.”
The stock market’s response to the strike thus far has been muted, with GM’s stock price dropping less than 3 percent from the end of trading Friday, reflecting hopes that GM and the UAW will be able to shut down the strike soon. However, uncertainty over the outcome of the strike has produced a spike in options trading, a sign that investors are expecting volatility in GM stock prices, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The company has enough cash on hand and its dealers have enough vehicles in stock to weather the storm without significant problems for at least a week, according to financial analysts. After that, investors may become more concerned, potentially having a greater impact on shares of the company,” CNBC reported.
The UAW’s $760 million strike fund: A bonanza for Solidarity House executives but only $250 per week for striking GM workers
19 September 2019
The powerful strike of American autoworkers against General Motors pits 47,000 workers against one of the world’s most profitable corporations. The strike is winning widespread support from workers who are looking to the strikers as the forward battalion in the global struggle against corporate domination and social inequality.
A struggle of this magnitude requires the mobilization of immense social and economic resources. Just as soldiers in an army must be adequately equipped in order to fight, workers engaged in a strike—a form of class warfare—must be adequately provisioned.
But the UAW officials, ensconced in the comfort of their corporate offices at Solidarity House, are refusing to provide GM workers with the support and resources they need to win this struggle.
Norwood Jewell, left, at opening of 2015 contract UAW-Fiat Chrysler talks (Credit: uaw-chrysler.com)
First, the UAW is keeping Ford and Fiat-Chrysler workers on the job, thereby leaving GM workers isolated and minimizing the impact of the strike.
Second, Solidarity House is limiting strike pay to $250 per week, far below the minimum required by autoworkers to cover their basic necessities during the strike. Even this does not begin until the second week of the strike, thus intensifying the financial burden borne by GM workers.
Calculated on the basis of a 40-hour week, the strike pay comes to $6.25 per hour, which is $3.20 below Michigan’s poverty-level minimum hourly wage of $9.45.
The financial expenditures of the UAW
The reason for the low strike pay is not because the UAW lacks the resources to pay workers more. The strike fund controlled by the UAW is $760 million. This money comes directly from contributions made by the workers. But only a fraction of that amount is being allocated by Solidarity House to the striking workers.
The subminimum wage being doled out by Solidarity House places the striking workers in a financial situation that will become increasingly desperate with each passing day. It is no secret that GM is counting on the economic distress facing workers to force them to accept another concessionary contract.
On Monday, the Detroit Free Press gleefully wrote: “What does $250 a week in strike pay really add up to these days? Not a lot. UAW strike pay is below the national poverty line, below the Michigan minimum wage and even below what the average retiree gets in Social Security.”
Noting that the low strike pay benefits the corporation, the Free Press added, “All those numbers give some perspective of just how tough it will be for strikers at General Motors to live on strike pay of $250 a week.”
But why is the UAW refusing to provide the workers with the support they need?
The UAW claims to be a union that defends the interests of tens of thousands of dues-paying members. In reality, it functions as a midsized corporation. Its primary business is providing and policing a low-cost workforce for General Motors, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler. The massive corruption scandal engulfing the organization is merely the naked expression of this fact.
The beneficiary of this corrupt business is a privileged group of approximately 450 salaried union executives, managers, office personnel and scores of flunkeys without any clearly defined job description. Their sole purpose—like mob characters in a Martin Scorsese movie—is to provide “muscle” for union officials whose patronage they depend on.
The Department of Labor filings show that there are over 450 UAW executives who made more than $100,000 in 2018. Even with the strike underway, the UAW has continued to issue paychecks to this gang of freeloaders. By the time workers receive their first strike paycheck, the UAW will have paid its own staff a total of $1.9 million.
According to 2018 Department of Labor filings, the UAW spent more than $72 million in salary and salary-related disbursements to UAW staff, equivalent to $276,483 per day. This includes those currently under indictment, who are getting paid between $2,000 and $3,000 a week. The UAW paid $3.7 million to its 30 officers in 2018, up from $2.4 million in 2017—a 54 percent increase in one year.
Most of these employees occupy placeholder positions with limited or no actual function. For example, the Department of Labor filings show there are 258 servicing representatives, 134 assistants, 83 secretaries, 42 organizers, 27 bookkeepers and 25 temporary campaign associates on the UAW payroll, most of whom make over $100,000 per year. What, for heaven’s sake, do these people do?
The UAW filings identify 18 typists and 10 stenographers! It would appear that Solidarity House has not updated its job functions since the 1950s. What are the actual jobs of the individuals holding these posts, pulling down salaries just below $100,000 annually? Are autoworkers to believe that UAW President Gary Jones and Vice President Cindy Estrada dictate their email to stenographers, who write down their pearls of wisdom and then turn their shorthand jottings over to typists? Don’t Jones and Estrada know how to send a text message on their own cell phones?
According to a recent job posting for a servicing representative at UAW Local 2322 in Massachusetts, the job of servicing representative entails “coordinating member-driven contract negotiations” and requires service representatives to “enforce contracts, resolve disputes,” “process grievances,” and “maintain regular and effective communication with workers.” As autoworkers know, however, servicing representatives do not perform any of these tasks. They make an average of $120,000 to $140,000.
The 42 “organizers” consist largely of bureaucrats past the age of 45 who make between $130,000 and $140,000. They do not actually organize anyone or anything. From 2017 to 2018, the UAW reported to the Department of Labor that it lost nearly 10 percent of its membership, dropping from 430,871 members in 2017 to 395,703 in 2018.
The rate of union executive-to-worker pay is grotesque. In comparison with autoworkers, a UAW service representative making $150,000 per year takes in over twice as much as a better-paid skilled tradesman making $75,000. The executive would make triple what a more senior autoworker making $50,000 per year makes and five times a temporary-part-time worker making $30,000 (if they work year-round).
Beyond salaries and fixed assets, the UAW spent an additional $25 million on other “representational activities.” Included in “representational activities” in 2018 were $359,815 in catering expenses, $1,337,357 on airplane tickets, and $5,395,442 in hotels and resorts.
In addition, in 2018 the UAW spent $30.8 million in benefits, $23.9 million in “general overhead,” $13.8 million in “union administration,” $10.4 million in “political activities and lobbying” and $4.7 million in improvements to UAW property like the Black Lake facility.
This money comes from the workers themselves. The average autoworker pays roughly $1,200 a year in union dues, meaning a worker with 5 years has paid $6,000 in dues (equal to 24 weeks of strike pay), and a worker with 25 years would have paid $30,000 in dues (the equivalent of more than two years of strike pay).
The UAW reported that the average monthly dues of a UAW member is $51.65. That means that by the end of 2019, Big Three workers will have paid over $100 million in dues since the beginning of 2015, while all UAW members will have contributed roughly $250 million during that period.
The UAW uses its “strike fund” to finance the apparatus
A significant portion of worker dues goes to maintaining the UAW’s “strike fund.” In 2001, the UAW strike fund was at $1 billion. Today, the fund contains $760 million.
Ostensibly, this fund is for financing strikes, but in fact it is used to finance the apparatus. The UAW has a massive strike fund but almost no strikes, and it intends to keep it this way. So why, without having called a substantial strike in over forty years, has the strike fund fallen $240 million over the last 18 years? The extent of the depletion is even worse when one calculates what the strike fund would be if its assets had been properly invested.
The fact is that Solidarity House has been using the strike fund as its executives’ own multimillion-dollar piggy bank.
In 1980, the UAW first amended its constitution to facilitate direct cash transfers from the strike fund to UAW salary payments and other expenses. At that time, 50 percent of all interest and dividends from UAW investments in the strike fund were directed to a fund set up by the union executives for salary and other non-strike expenses. In 1989, this was raised to 75 percent, and in 2006 the UAW moved to siphon off 100 percent of interest and revenue from strike fund investments.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, the UAW transferred large amounts of money out of the strike fund, including $50 million in 1995, $75 million in 2002, $60 million in 2006 and $160 million from 2010-13. Last year, the UAW agreed to transfer another $25 million from the strike fund. As a result, the UAW now spends significant amounts of money derived from the strike fund on non-strike-related activity.
In 2018, the UAW only spent $208,970 in strike benefit payouts. In comparison, the UAW spent $748,239 purchasing furniture—more than triple the amount they spent on paying workers’ strike pay.
The need for rank-and-file committees
The UAW has a vested interest in shutting down the strike, not only to protect their slush fund and their salaries, but to protect the exploitative business model of the UAW.
Hundreds of UAW officers are fearful that strike pay will drain the UAW’s assets and cut off the endless flow of workers’ dues money into their own pockets. The UAW officers hope to use the organizational apparatus and its resources to isolate workers and force through a concession contract to end the strike, thereby maintaining their position as policemen of the workforce.
In functioning as a strikebreaker, the UAW is giving expression to the nature of the unions as a whole. Last year, during oral arguments in the Supreme Court case of Janus v. AFSCME, union lawyer David Frederick made the explicit point that the role of the unions is to prevent strikes. The so-called “agency fees” (the equivalent of mandatory dues) are “the tradeoff for no strikes.” Without “union security,” he argued, “you can raise an untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”
Frederick’s argument was clear: the financial stability of the trade unions is essential in preventing the growth of working-class opposition in the United States. They are an industrial police force in the service of the corporations and the state.
This is the role that the UAW is playing in the current struggle. It is not a question of reforming this organization. The UAW is staffed by and serves the interests of the affluent UAW executives.
What workers need is their own rank-and-file committees that they democratically control. Such rank-and-file committees must be premised on sharing information between workers, facilitating democratic decision-making among all workers, and ensuring that workers can take common action based on the decisions they reach.
The formation of rank-and-file committees is urgently required to prevent the defeat of the strike. The autoworkers must gain full control over the financial resources that are being misused by Solidarity House.
The outcome of the strike will not be decided by the size of strike pay alone. A comprehensive social and political strategy is required to mobilize the full strength of the working class within the United States and internationally behind the strike. But as the autoworkers fight to expand the strike, they must have at their disposal the necessary resources. Therefore:
- The strike pay must be raised immediately to $750 per week.
- The regular bloated salaries of all UAW functionaries should be immediately suspended. All nonessential personnel should be furloughed, pending the successful conclusion of the strike. Remaining union functionaries should be paid no more than striking workers.
But more importantly—since money is not everything—workers must take control of the political direction of the strike.
In fighting General Motors, they are not just engaged in a trade union struggle against CEO Mary Barra and her board of directors. They are in a political struggle against the massed power of the Wall Street banks, who stand behind GM, willing to back up its anti-worker demands with billions in credit.
And behind the banks stands the capitalist state, from Republican Donald Trump in the White House down to Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Democratic Mayor of Detroit Michael Duggan, and an array of other governors and mayors, all prepared to mobilize the armed power of the police and the repressive forces of the federal government against the workers.
Against the corporations and their union partners, backed by the capitalist government at all levels, rank-and-file committees will advance the interests of all autoworkers and will make a broad appeal to workers and youth in all countries and all industries: the struggle against the corporations requires a broad, united movement of the working class against social inequality.
GM shuts off healthcare for striking autoworkers, begins to use scabs in attempt to break strike
On September 19 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time, the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter is hosting an online meeting to discuss the strategy and perspective needed to win the strike. To participate, visit wsws.org/autocall.
Auto giant General Motors is moving aggressively to break the strike by nearly 50,000 autoworkers in the US.
The company has already cut off healthcare for striking workers, forcing them onto substandard insurance provided by the UAW strike fund. The move was seen by commentators as a major and deliberate provocation, with the Detroit Free Press describing it as “pouring gas on the fire.”
The company is already hiring scabs to reopen key facilities, including plants in Arlington, Wentzville and Flint.
The giant auto company is losing up to $100 million a day due to the strike, which has already led to a shortage of parts and production slowdowns in Canada and Mexico. GM has announced 1,200 temporary layoffs at its assembly plant in Oshawa due to a shortage of parts. Parts supplier Lear has laid off an entire department at its facility in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico.
Pickets at Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly
The global impact of the strike demonstrates the unity of interests between American workers and their brothers and sisters around the world, who are integrated in a global process of production and who face the same transnational corporations. Moreover, GM workers have overwhelming support from workers in other countries, as demonstrated by the meetings held by autoworkers in Silao, Mexico in support of the US strike.
Autoworkers are not only fighting CEO Mary Barra and other corporate executives in Detroit. Behind them stand Wall Street and powerful global investors who want an intensification of the assault on the working class to fuel the endless rise on the stock markets.
Just a few weeks after Wall Street threatened to reduce Ford’s credit rating to “junk status” for not implementing a savage cost-cutting drive fast enough, the Moody’s credit rating agency issued the same threat to GM if it does not quickly defeat the strike and impose its dictates on workers.
In a New York Times column Tuesday, Steven Greenhouse warned that the “Autoworkers strike is bigger than GM.” It is part of a wave of strikes over the last two years by teachers, supermarket, hotel and other workers, which has been fueled by “Americans’ widespread dismay with wage stagnation and income inequality, even as corporate profits are flying high.” Greenhouse writes that “successful strikes beget successful strikes.”
The seriousness with which the ruling class takes this struggle is shown by the rapid intervention of the Trump administration, which wants an end to the strike and to push through a deal in which the UAW accepts management’s terms in exchange for keeping one or two plants open and supposedly “saving American jobs.”
As for the Democrats, they are the false friends of autoworkers. While claiming they support the strike, their main concern is to maintain the organizational domination of the UAW and force through further concessions. It was the Obama administration, working with the UAW, that led the assault on autoworkers during the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler, which included expanding the two-tier wage system and eliminating overtime after eight hours.
As for the UAW, it does not have a strategy for victory, it has a strategy for defeat. The UAW, whose top leadership faces indictment for embezzlement and bribery charges, has forced 110,000 Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers to stay on the job even though both automakers are demanding similar, if not worse, concessions from workers.
At the same time, the UAW is not paying any strike benefits for the first week, and after that a pitiful $250 a week, guaranteeing that workers will face financial pressures to end the strike.
The UAW has also not called for mass picketing and mass demonstrations to stop strikebreaking. In at least some locations, it is explicitly ordering workers to allow scabs through unhindered, cynically using the threat of arrest to intimidate workers. Moreover, the strike was only called after the union ordered production workers on Sunday to cross the picket lines of maintenance workers, who are also in the UAW.
The UAW fears that even a perceived victory would encourage other workers to rebel against decades of union-backed concessions, disrupting its decades-long relations with the corporations. Its “negotiations” with the company are little more than a grand plea bargain, whereby figures such as Gary Jones hope to avoid lengthy jail terms by demonstrating their value in shutting down the strike as soon as possible.
To carry out a serious fight, workers must break the UAW-imposed isolation of the strike and mobilize the full weight of the working class in defense of the autoworkers.
This requires the formation of a network of rank-and-file factory committees operating in every plant, democratically controlled by the workers.
GM workers organized in factory committees should make an urgent appeal to their brothers and sisters at Ford and Fiat Chrysler, who are no less determined to fight, to join them in their struggle.
They must turn out into the neighborhoods, to student youth, teachers, warehouse workers, and other sections of the working class in order to make their struggle the focal point of a broader movement of the entire working class.
Above all, autoworkers must link up their struggle with workers internationally, who confront essentially the same conditions and the same globally organized capitalist system. In particular, this means linking up with the tens of millions of autoworkers and auto parts workers throughout the world.
Without such an international strategy, based on an understanding of the international scope and character of the class struggle, it is impossible even to organize a unified movement in the American auto industry, which is composed not only of the Detroit automakers but the dozens of foreign-based transnational auto companies that operate in the United States.
As GM tries to cut health benefits for workers on strike, Federal Reserve prepares more handouts to Wall Street
Forty-six thousand US autoworkers went on strike this week to fight efforts by GM to cut their healthcare benefits, based on the claim that workers’ healthcare plans are “unaffordable” for the multi-billion-dollar corporation.
Other US and international companies, together with the banks that control them, are looking to GM to set a benchmark for reducing labour costs to offset the impact of a slowing global economy.
Workers, in other words, will have to pay for a mounting global economic crisis, as they did after the 2008 financial crash, when pay cuts ensured a decade of record profits for corporations and banks.
But the Federal Reserve is taking exactly the opposite attitude to Wall Street, providing billions of dollars in free cash to ensure that the looming global economic downturn does not affect corporate bottom lines.
A striking GM worker (left) A stock market trader (right) [Credit: Associated Press]
On Wednesday, the US central bank cut its benchmark federal funds rate, reducing the borrowing cost for banks and major corporations that are already posting record profits.
Perhaps even more importantly, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York made two emergency injections of $75 billion into financial markets, in the first such actions since the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed is on track to make a third emergency intervention on Thursday.
This week’s events have made clear that the trillions in free money given to the banks after the 2008 financial crisis were only a down payment.
The Financial Times wrote that the move is “a step towards more QE.” This is a reference to the “quantitative easing” programs that, over the decade following the global financial crisis, saw the printing of $4 trillion by the US central bank and its infusion into the financial system.
That was in addition to the nearly $7 trillion of “emergency lending” by the Federal Reserve and treasury to the financial system, which was used to prop up over $30 trillion in financial assets after the 2008 crash.
Commentators drew far-reaching implications from this week’s developments. “How significant is this? Extraordinarily…The Fed [lost] control of monetary policy,” the Financial Times quoted one US banker as saying.
The fact is a decade of massively expansionary monetary policy has distorted elements of the economy in profound ways. It raises the prospect that the next economic crisis will throw into question, not just the survival of the financial system, but the stability of the dollar and solvency of the government.
However, the Fed’s only answer to the mounting crisis is to throw more money at the banks.
The Fed’s actions this week sent a clear message to Wall Street that more money is on tap. “After the New York Fed’s temporary injections of money into the financial system, many in the market think a lasting solution will require the central bank to start expanding its balance sheet once more,” the Financial Times wrote.
The article concluded, “The resumption of quantitative easing… appears closer than many think.”
But even the extraordinary actions of the Federal Reserve this week were too little for US President Donald Trump, who wanted an even bigger rate cut.
In response to this week’s announcement, Trump tweeted, “Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Fail Again. No ‘guts,’ no sense, no vision! A terrible communicator!”
The real estate conman turned president has repeatedly and consistently demanded that the US central bank explicitly pump up the value of the stock market.
“If the Fed would cut, we would have one of the biggest Stock Market increases in a long time,” Trump tweeted in August. Left unsaid is the fact that rising stock market prices overwhelmingly benefit the super-rich, who hold the vast majority of financial assets.
Amid a slowing global economy, the Fed has manifestly failed in its attempt to “normalize” monetary policy. Instead, it is once again opening the money spigot to ensure that the wealth of America’s financial oligarchy is protected, while corporations ramp up their attack on workers’ jobs, pay, and benefits.
“Take control of the struggle!” Logistics workers at UPS and FedEx support GM strike, warn of union treachery
Throughout the United States and around the world, the strike of nearly 50,000 General Motors workers is being closely watched by workers of all industries. Logistics workers at UPS, FedEx and Amazon are speaking out in support and want to unite with autoworkers in a joint struggle against the exploitation of the profit system.
“Keep fighting and I wish I could help more. What you're doing is a strike for all of us. The workers shall rise,” said Mike, a UPS warehouse worker in Chicago about the GM workers on strike.
Mike went through the experience of the betrayals of the Teamsters union in the 2018 contract struggle, which resulted in the maintenance of poverty wages for part-time UPS warehouse workers and a two-tier system of delivery drivers. The Teamsters rammed through a sellout contract, which was voted down by a majority of workers, using an anti-democratic loophole in the union’s constitution. The anti-democratic maneuver sparked seething anger by more than 250,000 UPS workers, who had voted by more than 90 percent to go on strike against the logistics giant.
“They caved on issues that they promised they wouldn’t accept,” said Mike, “like the 22.4 [lower-paid hybrid warehouse and delivery drivers] and they screwed over the part-time employees by not increasing the amount of full time jobs.”
Conditions in UPS warehouses across the country are “unsafe to say the least,” he said. “Between the fires and other issues we face daily, not to mention filthy conditions, they cut housekeeping in half. The roof is sinking in some places and will leak for days.”
While the Teamsters under Hoffa have feigned sympathy for GM autoworkers and have claimed to honor the workers’ strike pickets, the reality is that the Teamsters union is as deeply corrupt as the United Auto Workers (UAW) union that GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler workers are fighting today. Just like their counterparts in the UAW, the Teamsters today are business outfits that defend the interests of the corporations against the working class.
“The union and the company both need to be taken down,” said Mike. He agreed with the call by the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter that rank-and-file committees need to be built by GM workers and the rest of the working class in opposition to the outmoded unions that function as little more than appendages of management today.
“The rank and file part absolutely needs to be implemented, but not just here—for everyone everywhere. We’re the workers. We need to realize we have the power.”
Marty, a UPS worker in Detroit, spoke out against the corruption of the Teamsters and the UAW, which is embroiled in a federal investigation that has resulted in multiple indictments.
“Corruption all the way up to the UAW president. No surprise there,” said Marty about the recent corruption charges brought against current UAW president Gary Jones and former president Denis Williams. “I just wish they would indict or charge more crooked Teamsters like Hoffa, Hall, Dennis Taylor and the rest of the red-vested criminals.”
Speaking for rank-and-file UPS workers who refuse to cross picket lines, Marty said, “We are honoring them at UPS.” He contrasted this with the phony support of Hoffa and the Teamsters bureaucracy who have no interest in genuinely fighting for UPS workers, let alone GM autoworkers on strike. When asked if he trusted the Teamsters leadership, he replied “Not in the least.”
Marty said of the theatrics of the Teamsters bureaucracy, “Hoffa is a piece of colluding garbage. I just wish we could prove it. He and his lieutenants are all dirty.”
Ronald, a FedEx worker in Chicago spoke against the abysmal $250 weekly strike pay by the UAW, which only kicks in on the second week of the strike. “A lot of these people probably have rent coming up in two weeks. A lot of folks are living paycheck to paycheck and I doubt even $500 covers their rent.”
“I'm proud of them,” Ronald said. “They're facing immense pressure to submit to corporate pressure from both their employer and their union, but they are still standing up for their rights.
Regarding the UAW, “it looks like they are trying to play both sides. Tentatively supporting a strike, but not too strongly so they don’t actually have to confront the corporations that they work with. It’s pretty astonishing to be honest and it's pretty clear that the union has no interest in a struggle with the major auto companies.”
“That’s the crux of the matter. I believe that the people in charge [of the unions] have more interest in keeping business moving as smooth as possible. And from what I’ve seen, they’ve done very little do disabuse me from that belief.”
Ronald added, “At the very least the workers need to organize outside of the capitalist labor unions and actually advocate for their interests without corrupt union bureaucrats acting as roadblocks. They need to understand that their power and their rights come their ability to act and their relationship to the means of production, not because some middle man says they have it.
“And the road forward from there is understanding that they are stronger together and not separated by union or nationality. Operating within the capitalist labor union system, that sort of collective action is just not possible.”
Speaking of the need for rank-and-file committees, Ronald said, “I one hundred percent agree with that demand and the need for direct workers control of the strike through committees. It’s pretty clear that the rank-and-file workers can’t depend on the union bureaucrats to advocate for their rights and interests, so they need to take control of the struggle directly.”
Dameon, another UPS worker in Illinois, spoke out in defense of all autoworkers. “I told my wife, who is a Fiat-Chrysler worker, that I would demand strike pay right now and refuse to work. They should be demanding to stand in solidarity with their brothers and sisters.” Speaking of the need for the working class to fight back, Dameon said, “I’ve talked about a revolution for years. I know the people have the power. We’re all one union of people. It's time for change.”
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