Dana contract details reveal pay cuts, no change to 70 to 84-hour workweek
According to details of the proposed Dana tentative agreement (TA) acquired by the Autoworker Newsletter, the company and two unions “representing” Dana workers, the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers, are proposing a highly exploitative contract that is far worse than what is now in place. The proposal itself is an insult and a provocation that shows Dana workers must unite and strategize for a real fight.
A leaked pay scale that includes figures for the Fort Wayne, Indiana and Pottstown, Pennsylvania plants shows pay for tier two will only increase between $0.40 and $1.00 each year through 2026. With inflation at 4 percent a year, this would effectively be a pay cut, and a massive pay cut if inflation and the cost of living rise higher. Tier two workers will top out at just $22 an hour. Current employees making $15.50 at present will make only $19.25 in year six.
Pay for tier one will increase by just $0.35 in years 1 and 3 of the contract and $0.30 in year 5, with a taxable lump sum payment of $1,750 in intervening years.
Workers should call this insulting TA the “Pay Cut Contract.”
This TA is a full-scale attack on Dana workers at every plant, no matter their race, nationality or experience level. It is no wonder the UAW was withholding this from workers and giving them no time to think it over before they vote. It is a further confirmation, as the Autoworker Newsletter stated, that what the UAW and USW were doing with the company was not “negotiating” but conspiring together against workers.
As one worker in Kentucky put it: “The UAW is not for us. The people representing our plant are nothing. They’re not negotiating, they are in the bathroom on their knees before the company. These people who ‘represent us’ get weekends and 4 weeks of vacation.”
The provocative character of the contract confirms that the company is preparing for a major showdown. It is time workers took the conduct of this struggle into their own hands to coordinate across plants, share information, and come up with a real strategy. This means establishing a rank-and-file committee.
The UAW and USW are conspiring to sabotage any struggle by workers. Despite the looming possibility of a strike, workers are laboring up to 84 hours a week under conditions that resemble the 1800s. The UAW and USW are helping the company stockpile parts and trying to exhaust workers by pushing them to the physical and mental limit. Meanwhile, workers report that the company is bringing in scabs to prepare to run the Dry Ridge, Kentucky plant in case of a strike.
Dana can afford to provide workers with a significant pay increase and a 40-hour workweek, with guaranteed weekends off, air-conditioned plants and safe, clean, new machines. In the first quarter of 2021, after forcing workers to work during the COVID pandemic, it posted $2.2 billion in sales and is making another round of dividend payments to shareholders. Dana’s Trump-loving CEO made over $10 million in 2020 as workers died of COVID and worked themselves to the bone.
It is an insult to the entire international working class that workers should be forced to endure conditions like those that Dana workers confront every day.
In Dry Ridge, Kentucky, a Dana worker died in July after falling asleep at the wheel after working an 84-hour week. She left behind six grandchildren. Another worker died at the same plant after having a seizure on the shop floor. Coworkers were ordered not to give assistance as the man flailed around on the floor. The company kept the line working, and even sent the dead worker a notification that he had been mandated to work the following weekend.
There is a brewing mood of rebellion against these conditions, which are being maintained with the collusion of the unions, the workers’ supposed representatives. Workers are angry and looking for a way to fight. Thousands of workers read the August 20 statement by the Dana Workers’ Rank-and-File Committee entitled “Release the full contract! Workers have the right to know what’s in the tentative agreement!”
Workers at other plants report they are also working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, with mandated weekend work every weekend:
Paris, Tennessee: “We don’t know anything about our contract. All we know is that there’s a tentative agreement. They haven’t told us anything. They told us ‘details to come,’ and we don’t even have a time for our meeting next weekend. Our union reps told us we couldn’t strike over money. It would have to be over health and safety issues.”
Ft. Wayne, Indiana: “I have watched it go to complete hell. Our union doesn’t do anything and by the looks of this contract they’re trying to get us to vote on, they just [crapped] all over us. We have a two-tier system and that’s not what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be equal for all. We are all pretty pissed off here.”
Lima, Ohio: “I work at Dana Lima plant. Our situation is similar to y’all’s with not knowing anything with the contract we are just left in the dark. It would be nice to know what’s going on. A few of our workers just came back from testing positive from covid and not once did they come out and clean the machine where they were working or let us know that they had covid. They’re bringing in all these new hires with sign on bonuses and when we asked what about us we got told ‘it is what it is.’”
St. Clair, Michigan: “We are just as outraged as you for the complete lack of communication. Our union chairperson has not been communicating with the representatives on our shifts. Some of us think that the only reason they announced a ‘tentative agreement’ was because of your story. We are currently being made to work 12 hours a day 5-6 days a week with 8-12 hours on Sunday. We do not have to worry about the health issues like you have to, except for the extremely poor handling of Covid. I would love to have both our plants to come together in solidarity and stand up for ourselves against both the UAW and Dana.”
Dry Ridge, Kentucky: “You can’t ask or report anything to the union reps about anything and if you are pulled up to Trump Tower where you’re written up or given a point for something, even if you know you’re right the union doesn’t back you up. Dana tells them to shut up let it go!! The union is weak in our eyes!”
A Volvo worker in Virginia who set up a rank-and-file committee during their struggle earlier this year had a message for Dana workers: “You’ve got to set up a rank-and-file committee. The UAW will get mad, but you’ve got to get information. There were lots of people who never thought or heard of anything different than what the union told us. But with a rank-and-file committee we got information out and got people to think outside the box. We organized ourselves. You should too.”
Student researchers in University of California system vote to join United Auto Workers union
On August 5, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced that the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) has verified that a majority of the 17,000 Student Researchers, spanning 10 UC campuses and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), have voted to unionize with the UAW-affiliated Student Researchers United (SRU). This marks the largest unionization drive of academic student employees in UAW’s history but represents a political dead-end for the UC student workers.
The card signing campaign to unionize began in Fall 2020 and was completed on May 24 of this year when student researchers submitted over 10,000 signed union authorization cards to the California Public Employees Relations Board in Oakland, California.
Student workers, like workers in many industries, have been facing an increasing cost of living coupled with stagnating wages. The cost of living in California for instance is among the highest in the United States, especially in the metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, home to many of the state’s largest universities.
Graduate instructors, who have been in the UAW for more than three decades, routinely make less than monthly rent on a local one-bedroom apartment. The increasingly precarious living conditions faced by student researchers and workers in other industries has undoubtedly been a driving force for the UC students to organize.
Student researchers are extremely valuable to the UC system, as their labor secures more patents than any other university in the world and helps to bring in the billions of dollars in grant revenue needed for research.
However, student researchers in California were not classified as employees of the UC system prior to 2017. This excluded them from collective bargaining, processing grievances, or even receiving workers’ compensation from the UC system if injured.
In 2017, UC Berkeley graduate student Holly Gildea reported in The Daily Californian that she was “burned in a chemical spill in my thesis lab. I was shocked to learn that UC Berkeley would not cover my medical expenses under workers’ compensation because it did not consider me an employee.”
In 2017, the California State Legislature amended the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA) to classify student researchers as employees, which opened the possibility for student researchers to enter union membership.
UC student researchers have chosen to join the UAW under the sincere but mistaken belief that the organization would use its large membership and substantial financial resources on their behalf. In reality, the UAW will seek to play the same role which it plays among hundreds of thousands of autoworkers and graduate students, which is to negotiate sweetheart deals with management behind their backs, while seeking to suppress and isolate them. The UAW does not function as a “workers’ organization” but as a labor police force opposed to the interests of workers they nominally represent.
The organization is consumed with unspeakable levels of corruption. Over a dozen former top union officials have pleaded guilty over the last four years to federal corruption charges stemming from accepting millions in bribes from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (now Stellantis) and using embezzled union dues on lavish Palm Springs getaways. This includes two of the last four presidents, Gary Jones and Dennis Williams. Former interim president Rory Gamble, who stepped down in June, was also reportedly under investigation.
This corruption, however, is a function of the social interests of the bureaucracy which controls this organization. The UAW commands more than $1.2 billion in assets and sits on a $790 million strike fund, which are used, not for strikes, but to finance the salaries of the apparatus. Last year, 450 out of 660 of its national staff at Solidarity House in Detroit made over $100,000. The UAW also depends heavily on tens of millions of dollars in company money every year through labor-management “training” schemes and other corporatist schemes as well as its control of billion-dollar pension and health care funds, which give it a financial stake in the exploitation of the workers they claim to represent.
If the UAW is officially recognized, student researchers will be compelled to fight on two fronts, against both the university administration and its agents in the union. This is demonstrated by a review of the experiences of workers inside the UAW.
In July 2021, nearly 3,000 auto workers at the Volvo Trucks plant in Dublin, Virginia waged a five-week strike in which they thrice defied the union’s attempts to bully them into accepting sellout contracts. Workers were emboldened by the formation by a section of their coworkers of an independent Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee. The UAW finally ended the strike by forcing workers to vote again on the exact same agreement which they had rejected only a week before, claiming it passed in the re-vote by a mere 17 ballots. The new contract is a six-year agreement which maintains the hated two-tier wage structure and contains wage increases below the rate of inflation.
In March, Columbia University graduate workers in the UAW went on strike to demand increased wages, health care, third party arbitration and summer stipends. However, the UAW unilaterally ended the strike without a vote on the pretext that the strike was simply being put on “pause,” in order to isolate graduate students at New York University, whose own strike vote the union arbitrarily prolonged to buy it time to shut down the strike at Columbia. The UAW also encountered an incipient rebellion among graduate students, and Columbia grad students voted down an austerity contract in April.
In California last year, graduate student instructors defied the authority of the UAW at UC Santa Cruz and waged a bitter four-month-long wildcat strike against the University of California to demand cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) of $1,412 per month to meet rising housing costs, which quickly grew into a full teaching and research strike. UCSC grad students, who defied threats of arrest and firing by UC President and former head of Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, quickly gained support among their counterparts across the UC system, many of whom joined the strike.
However, the orientation of the COLA strike leaders towards pressuring the UAW to act on their behalf led them into a blind alley, eventually ending the strike and throwing their support behind the UAW’s lame offer to hold a strike vote on an officially declared Unfair Labor Practices strike. The UAW ultimately did not even hold this strike vote, arguing that COLA organizers had not demonstrated that it would have sufficient support. Ultimately, the UAW allowed UC to fire as many as 80 strikers without any serious opposition.
Graduate students, having been proletarianized through decades of cuts and shrinking prospects for permanent university positions, face the same conditions faced by workers in the factories and warehouses, in the restaurants and cafes, both in the United States and abroad. This points to the need for them to link up their own struggle with those of the working as a whole.
Student workers at UC must learn from the struggles of the international working class, which points to the need for new orientation and organization. This is why the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are fighting to form rank-and-file committees on campuses, schools and factories across the country, to mobilize the independent initiative of the working class independent of and in opposition to the pro-capitalist trade unions.
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