Monday, October 28, 2019

GENERAL MOTORS FIRES WORKERS WHO EXPOSED THEM ON SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS

In order to secure any of their needs, it is necessary for workers to build a political party of their own and fight for socialism: the running of society to meet the social needs of the working class, not the profit interests of the financial oligarchy.

After UAW sellout of strike, GM fires workers for social media posts

Less than twenty-four hours after the United Auto Workers declared its sellout deal ratified and shut down the 40-day strike at General Motors, the auto giant moved immediately to begin firing militant workers for their social media posts.
Facebook post confirming that Flint Truck workers have been fired for social media activity
“Just to let everyone know, a [couple] of members have been terminated as of this morning for [Facebook posts] while on strike,” a worker posted to the UAW Solidarity Now Facebook group. “When he reported this morning, his badge wouldn’t work and was escorted to labor. He said labor has a list of names. (Flint Assembly) GM has been monitoring social media (as we know that they do).” The worker posted a screenshot of a statement from the Local 598 chairman who confirmed the firings and acknowledged that “GM global security has been monitoring Facebook [throughout] the strike.”
The victimization of militant workers takes place as the auto companies and the UAW threaten 55,000 Ford and 47,200 Fiat Chrysler workers whose contracts come up next.
A Fiat Chrysler worker reported that higher seniority “legacy” workers were being threatened with termination for posting statements critical of the company and the UAW on social media or even advising younger workers about the upcoming contract fight.
At the same time, the UAW is sanctioning forced overtime and speedup so that the company can stockpile vehicles to weaken the impact of a potential strike. “We are concerned that workers at Fiat Chrysler are going to get screwed worse than any of the Big Three,” the Fiat Chrysler worker said.
These threats take place after GM fired nine Mexican workers at its Silao plant for refusing to increase production of Silverado and Sierra pickup trucks during the US strike. One of the victimized workers told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “The plant is opening Monday and the workers have been informed that we will have no permission to go to the bathroom and they are taking away our vacation days to make up lost production from the strike. The company and the union agreed to this. The workers filed grievances with the labor relations department, but they want to treat us like slaves.”
“The fired workers face a rough road ahead. Many of us have been blacklisted and we can’t find another job to feed our families. We are looking to the American workers to demand that we get reinstated and an end to the blacklisting.”
Autoworkers must demand that GM immediately reinstate all workers fired for exercising their right to free speech during the strike in the United States and in Mexico. But workers must organize this fight independently of and in opposition to the UAW, which deliberately isolated the GM strikers, put them on starvation rations of $250-75 a week in strike pay and then rammed through a pro-company contract.
The deal is almost identical to GM’s original proposal before the strike. It confirms the closure of four plants and paves the way for the conversion of large sections of the workforce into low-paid temps with no contractual rights, but who still pay union dues.
According to the union’s own dubious figures, 44.5 percent of production workers voted against the contract, and workers in at least 12 local units voted it down, including in large assembly plants like Lordstown, Ohio; Spring Hill, Tennessee; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Delta and Orion townships in Michigan and three western New York component plants.
Many more workers were opposed to the sellout deal but did not see the point of remaining on strike for several more weeks when they knew the union would only come back with the same proposal.
Generations ago, the defense of workers from victimization stemming from strike activity was one of the basic representational activities that trade unions carried out. The participants in the Flint sit-down strike, who occupied GM’s factories in defiance of the law, along with workers victimized for union activity, were rehired after the GM strikers returned to work.
The union has long since abandoned such elementary responsibilities. While Local 598 has reportedly filed grievances on behalf of the fired workers, there can be no doubt that it will go the same place as the vast majority of grievances filed by autoworkers—nowhere.
While nothing is known about how GM compiled their lists of workers to fire, it is entirely possible that the UAW itself is working with the company to finger the most militant workers. Most Facebook groups that the autoworkers frequent are closed to the public and require a vetting process for new members to prove their identity, precisely to keep workers from being victimized for their comments. However, union officials regularly troll these pages on the lookout for militant workers.
Since UAW President Doug Fraser helped Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca close down the most militant plants in the aftermath of Chrysler’s 1979 bankruptcy, the UAW has a long history of victimizing and threatening militant workers. The World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter documented a case from last year where UAW officials at GM’s Fort Wayne Assembly colluded with management to fire a worker who had reached out to the union for help with company harassment.
Little more than a week ago, the local bureaucracy at Spring Hill, Tennessee called the police on workers campaigning for a “no” vote outside of the local union’s informational meeting. At Wentzville, Missouri, officials stopped an informational meeting when they discovered that a worker was livestreaming the event on Facebook and intimidated her into stopping the recording.
The UAW has particularly targeted the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter for censorship and has threatened workers who have circulated its articles. As it did in 2015, UAW officials denounced the Autoworker Newsletter as “fake news,” as Solidarity House hired a Washington, DC PR firm and colluded with the corporate media to conceal the real content of the sellout deal.
It then rushed through the “education sessions” on the contract and ratification votes to give workers as little time as possible to study and discuss the deal. One Lordstown worker said UAW national and local officials were giving one story about the contract to one local and other stories to other locals.
This is to say nothing of the dubious character of the voting process itself, which was carried out with no independent oversight. Absurdly large “yes” votes at large plants like Arlington, Flint Truck and Wentzville, Missouri led to charges by workers that the UAW had once again resorted to stuffing the ballot box to ensure an inflated “yes” vote and the contract’s passage nationally, as it did at Ford in 2015.
Far from defending the heroic workers in Silao, the UAW demanded that far more than nine Mexican autoworkers lose their jobs, declaring that reallocating product from Mexican plants to the United States was a top priority in their negotiations.
With the signing of this contract, which will condemn a whole generation of temp workers to poverty and at-will employment, the UAW is helping the auto companies “import” the same conditions of industrial slavery north of the border.



Lessons of the GM autoworkers strike


On Friday, the United Auto Workers announced that its proposed contract with General Motors had been ratified by 57 percent, ending the 40-day-long strike by roughly 46,000 autoworkers.
The deal with GM is the latest in a series of UAW-made sellout contracts stretching back 40 years. The agreement allows the company to massively expand its low-paid temporary workforce and proceed with the shutdown of three factories and one parts facility: the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant; the Warren and Baltimore transmission plants; and the Fontano, California, parts distribution center.
Striking workers outside the outside the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant in Hamtramck on September 16 (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
GM workers widely and angrily opposed the agreement from the moment the UAW released its contract “highlights” on October 18. Over the course of the strike, many hundreds of workers participated in online meetings hosted by the WSWS, discussing how to organize the fight back against the company’s and UAW’s demands.
To overcome this resistance, the UAW set into motion its hired PR reps, social media specialists and company spin doctors, deploying officials throughout the country to secure the deal using a combination of lies and threats at misnamed “educational sessions.” In a widely viewed Facebook video, UAW Local 1853 officials in Spring Hill, Tennessee, called the police on workers campaigning for a “no” vote a week ago.
Many workers have raised doubts over the legitimacy of the UAW’s vote tallies and balloting procedures, particularly the large “yes” votes reported at plants where substantial opposition was well-known, such as Flint Truck Assembly. As one worker commented on the UAW’s Facebook page, “I’m quite sure UAW membership DID NOT ratify this contract, in my past 24 years whenever membership votes no it still passes!”
Whatever the role of outright fraud, there is no doubt that a large proportion of workers who voted “yes” did so because they had no confidence that the UAW would respond to a contract rejection with anything better. They saw no point in enduring further hardship knowing they would only be presented with a recycled version of the same deal.
The UAW’s “ratification” of the deal resolves nothing. The contract is no more legitimate than those previously negotiated by the bribed company agents at “Solidarity House.” If the UAW has succeeded in the short term in forcing the company’s demands through, it has done so at the expense of even further discrediting itself among workers.
The stage is now set for a showdown with workers at Ford and Fiat Chrysler.
Ford, which the UAW has selected as its next “target,” will seek concessions and costs savings to match or exceed those from GM’s layoffs and plant shutdowns. Kristin Dziczek of the pro-corporate Center for Automotive Research told the Wall Street Journal Friday, “This pattern is pretty costly [to Ford and FCA] because one of the big things GM won is closing plants that will save billions. The other two don’t want to close plants. If you don’t want to close plants, what is the win for the company?”
In a statement Friday, Ford threw down the gauntlet to workers, saying it is seeking to “enhance its competitiveness” in its next contract. Industry analysts have speculated for weeks that Ford is looking to reduce its healthcare costs, estimated to top $1 billion next year, by either raising the amount workers have to pay out of pocket or imposing restrictions on access to care.
While Wall Street responded favorably to the conclusion of the GM strike, sending GM’s stock price up 2.57 percent by market close on Friday, it has hammered Ford’s share value over the last year. CEO Jim Hackett is under pressure to accelerate his promises to impose “financial fitness” on the company through layoffs and cuts to labor costs.
The auto giants and the major finance houses that stand behind them are seeking to use the development of new technologies—including electric vehicles and artificial intelligence—to restructure the global auto industry and impose even greater levels of exploitation on workers. Key aspects of the deal with GM are the UAW’s oversight of the use of temps and the establishment of a company-union “National Committee on Advanced Technology,” which mark new milestones in the UAW’s integration into the structures of company management.
The GM strike, the longest national auto strike in the US in nearly 50 years, has objective significance far beyond its immediate outcome. The international resurgence of class struggle has broken into the open among a crucial section of the industrial working class in the US, with effects that will continue to reverberate.
But if workers are to stop the further destruction of their jobs and living standards and prevent similar defeats at Ford, Fiat Chrysler and elsewhere, they must draw the following necessary conclusions:
1. Rank-and-file committees must be formed independent of the unions.
The UAW is not in any sense a workers’ organization, but rather an entrenched arm of management, functioning ever-more openly as a de facto temp agency. As long as it remains in control of the contract bargaining process, it will continue to attempt to enforce sellout agreements, with immeasurable consequences for workers and their families: closed factories, lost jobs, poverty wages, disintegrating benefits, and increasingly dangerous working conditions.
The time is past due for workers to form their own organizations. Workers at every GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler plant and workplace should hold meetings and elect rank-and-file factory committees from among the most trusted workers.
These committees should draw up demands that actually correspond to what workers need. And they should establish networks of communication across the auto industry, including the auto parts sector, and with other sections of workers coming into struggle, including the 32,000 teachers and school staff striking in Chicago and the 2,000 copper miners who have walked out in Texas and Arizona.
2. Every fight by workers must be guided by an international strategy.
The GM strike, a component of the global upsurge of class struggle, has revealed the growing recognition among workers of the need for international collaboration.
Early in the strike, GM workers in Silao, Mexico, courageously defied management’s demands for speed-up and overtime, refusing to be used as leverage against workers in the US. Subjected to a wave of firings and other victimizations, they appealed for support from their brothers and sisters in America.
Their stand elicited a powerful response among workers in the US, who read about their fight through the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter. The online meetings held by WSWS have taken on an ever-more explicitly international character, bringing together workers from the US, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India and elsewhere.
This organic desire for international solidarity and collaboration must now be raised to a higher level. The globally integrated nature of production, and of the working class itself, is an objective fact. It requires workers to adopt an international strategy, coordinate their struggles across borders and consciously reject the nationalism promoted by the unions and the political establishment.
3. The struggle for the interests of the working class requires a socialist perspective and political party.
The GM strike was not a mere contract struggle. In seeking to defend their interests, workers are raising fundamental questions about who runs society and for what purpose. As the founders of modern socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote, “Every class struggle is a political struggle.”
The capitalist class is operating on the basis of a worked-out strategy. The funneling of ever greater sums into Wall Street to prop up the financial markets requires the intensification of the exploitation of the working class, the source of all profit. In particular, the corporations intend to make low-wage temporary work, with no benefits, the new normal.
Around the world, masses of workers and youth are being driven into struggle by the consequences of four decades of social counterrevolution: unending and worsening austerity, authoritarianism and war.
None of the aspirations of those coming into struggle can be met under capitalism. It is a system based on the brutal exploitation of the labor of the working class, one which subordinates all questions to the relentless drive for profit. And it is a system supported by the Democratic and Republican parties in the US and their counterparts internationally.
In order to secure any of their needs, it is necessary for workers to build a political party of their own and fight for socialism: the running of society to meet the social needs of the working class, not the profit interests of the financial oligarchy.

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