Can the UAW Strike Become Labor’s Next Giant Step?
In the aftermath of COVID, labor has been trying to catch up. Not only from the runaway inflation and interest rates but from the givebacks, wage freezes, lockouts and furloughs suffered in the 2008-2011 global economic crisis. The crash was used to enforce austerities on workers around the globe. The Obama/Gettlefinger deal bailed out the industry so it could be restructured on the backs of the taxpayers and workers. UAW lost its COLA, the defined pension plan, tiers were implemented, wages were slashed, and for kickers the Obama/Biden deal blocked the right to strike until 2015. Profits soared but wages did not. Now the crisis of the world economy, climate catastrophe and inter-imperialist wars are exploding across the lives of all workers. The UAW members feel the heat and need a new direction which brings not only rank and file democracy but a class struggle strategy to win workers power!
While the U.S. empire faces a decline in relative and absolute economic power the leaders of both parties pound the war drums against China. Patriotism is obsolete where investment capital is involved, the Big Three are invested all across the globe; ALL it means is an excuse to make YOU sacrifice for their benefit! The last thing we need to do is acquiesce in the offshoring and the gradual decline of membership that made possible a labor aristocracy that ate the lunch of workers the world over, especially those overseas.
Two things happened since our parents’ time when they were sold the idea that a U.S. world empire was good for everyone. Balance of payments deficit became a balance of trade deficit and now the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall is in control of the productive economy and Wall Street and the banksters seek their superprofits in fictitious, speculative values. It makes NO SENSE and there is no reason to be put up to opposing foreign workers or their well-being. Anti-Asian hysteria and UAW indifference made possible the crushing of the Korean auto strike. We should make this clear as we strike “our own” robber barons.
The bosses on Wall St., in the corporate media and in the Democratic Party love a certain type of union leadership, a leadership prepared to sell out the members and ignore the class-wide implications in the class struggle, potentials of each negotiation and strike.
Listen to how the former CEO of Chrysler, looks back nostalgically at Ron Gettelfinger’s sell out in this CNN hit piece against a UAW strike…,
“…Nardelli recalled the ‘wonderful relationship’ he and other auto execs had with Ron Gettelfinger, who led the UAW during the Great Recession.
‘Without Ron’s support, the three of us — Ford, GM and Chrysler — would not have been able to make it through that challenging period when the financial institutions melted down and took us with them,’ Nardelli said.”
Today labor and management are walking to the brink and hoping each other blinks. The UPS, Longshore, and American Airlines pilots’ contracts all resolved with wage increases which, while larger than the bosses wanted, do not make up for what has been lost or secure future increases guaranteed to keep pace with inflation. They were resolved by labor leaders who not only blinked, but were not prepared to stand up with the backbone the membership expected. Members were feeling militant, came out for practice pickets, worked to rule, applied slow down tactics and most expected to strike. But workers were swayed by somewhere between 32% and 40% increases over long agreements and the Big Three took note.
So we know that the 40% demand and the end of two tiers are not only possible but realistic, something the shareholders have already factored into their portfolio rebalancing. The call for a shorter work week is a response to frustrations of the masses over the toxic work day, but it will take an all out strike, calling out the entire union and spreading the strike across the entire working class to win a shorter work week for all! With the 97% strike authorization Fain has the power but is not preparing the union for such a fight! As reported in the Detroit Click, “Fain has indicated that the union is willing to be flexible on its demands in order to reach a deal….The UAW was initially demanding a more than 40% wage increase, and has since dropped it to a 36% increase.” Why doesn’t the membership know what “progress“ with Ford means?
The bosses, the mortgage lenders, credit card companies, landlords, finance capitalists and price gougers of all stripes are calculating, right now, how to gouge us out of any wage gains we make. WE NEED A SLIDING SCALE OF WAGES AND NO RETREAT ON THE COLA!
We also know that unless new wage gains spread across the industry and the entire working class, a downward pressure on wages persists among the unorganized and lower wage workers. They can become the bosses’ scabs and fodder to break the union with non-union shops building Teslas, Toyotas and EV batteries. To win, to sustain and accelerate our wins we need to generalize this strike by sending UAW organizers into the unorganized shops at home and abroad to organize this industry wall to wall, including the open-shop South.
Biden claims to be the most pro-worker president ever. “Record Profits,” he said, “requires record contracts…, .” We remind workers it was the Obama/Biden/Gettelfinger deal that dug us into the hole in the first place. It was under their watch the GM/Toyota deal closed plants, opening the way for the anti-union Tesla to muscle into the Fremont, CA NUMMI plant. Thousands of ex-UAW workers lined up for work at Tesla’s scab wages and in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. This while Musk was being courted by the Silicon Valley crowd and toasted as a visionary by the capitalist class and the politicians of both parties. We 100 times prefer an industry-wide sit-down strike to a one-time Presidential photo opp on a picket line! The sitdown is the effective means of securing a better living. The photo opp is Biden campaigning for next year for nomination by one of the bosses’ parties. Workers don’t have a party, something you should address. Will he do anything about your sisters and brothers being laid off? He broke the rail strike and caused the UPS Teamsters to cave in. What is Fain up to?
To win, workers need to employ class struggle methods to unite the entire working class against the union busters and the political parties who cater to them. We know the Republicans hate unions while the Democrats will almost always show up at the Labor Day picnic to eat the workers beans. Their modus operandi is to allow our leaderships minimal access as long as they are committed to reigning in the militancy of the membership before it gets out of hand. And when push comes to a little shove, the Democratic Party will join with the GOP to clamp down on labor struggle such as with the 2022 rail negotiations. The Biden administration and both political parties played their real role as strikebreakers by imposing contracts on the rail workers with the threat of capitalist state repression waiting in the wings.
The eyes of the entire working class are on the UAW right now as it is launching the second tranche of strikes after one week on the picket lines. With the authority of the 97% strike vote, if the UAW made this a class-wide fight and called for all workers who have lost ground to unite in struggle, this strike could be the next Giant Step for labor. The UAW strike has broad majority support today as do other labor struggles.
Will Fain provide the necessary leadership to win? We do not know if his caucus is prepared to switch its strategy in time. Winning takes solidarity in action which means breaking Taft-Hartley and other anti-labor laws which outlaw solidarity strikes. The Democrats have allowed these anti-labor laws to stand for decades; they are treated as untouchable. Unions cannot win by abiding by those laws. Workers as a class must be politically independent. If a political labor conference were called to unite all workers around the strike, to launch organizing drives and solidarity strikes and put up independent labor candidates today they would get a broad hearing and launch labor’s next Giant Step.
We’ve seen support for a GENERAL STRIKE in the event of a government shutdown next week. We support this; there’s corruption everywhere we look and banksters plotting another crash. We need a politics that smashes Taft-Hartley and all anti-labor laws and both organizing drives and general strikes logically make a workers’ government possible. We need a workers government that will never go on strike against us! Would Fain support such class political independence?
When asked on Face the Nation, UAW president Shawn Fain said the union has not endorsed Biden, putting it on Biden to show in action that he deserves it. The strike, he said, will be won on the picket line not by the intervention of politicians! At this new moment of accelerating class conflict, when the political failures of the twin parties of capitalism to address the crisis are increasingly apparent to all, he did not take advantage of the moment to call for working class political independence! Instead he threw Biden a soft ball, inviting him to join the picket line, and Biden went for it. This is the set up to keep the UAW and the working class locked into the capitalist Democrats.
Militant trade unionists, and revolutionary socialist workers, however, must disagree with brother Fain who makes support for the capitalist Democrats optional while welcoming Biden to the picket line. We say this is time for labor to proclaim its organizing drive and its political independence. To win this battle we have to reorient labor. Right now Fain’s popularity in the working class is strong. Enthusiasm for the strike can be leveraged into a class wide offensive from the shop floor to the halls of power. A call by Fain for a hard break from the Democrats would breathe life into the new militancy and excitement into the working class.
Against Chauvinism:
For decades the capitalist class has pitted U.S. workers against the workers of the world. Demonizing immigrants and workers abroad for taking ‘our work.’ Indeed the UAW has been enlisted in and willingly participated in chauvinist “Buy American” campaigns. In their simplicity these campaigns direct the anger of workers away from the corporations who outsource and close union factories moving the work to Mexico, China and hard to unionize areas in the poverty stricken Republican states of the south east. Weakened and unwilling, the UAW did not vigorously attempt to organize the unorganized south or campaign to unite workers of the world in a fight for the same contract for the same work.
Today GM employs only 49,000 workers in the US while employing 58,000 workers in China. Repatriated profits go to the big shareholders while the capitalist media and politicians of both parties (who GM contributes to) stoke anger and hatred for China. It is a ruse, don’t fall for it. Our real enemies are not the Mexican or Chinese workers; it is those who closed our factories, sent the jobs away, and the bosses and owners there: where foreign auto strikes are broken by their bosses, our bosses win on their investments and push our wages down.
1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike
For a Class Struggle Leadership of Our Unions!
In order for workers to win it requires solidarity, militancy, organization and leadership.Those worker leaders who want to fight with one hand tied, or not even fight at all need to be replaced with a leadership thrown up by the ranks who will. Bringing out only part of the union disperses union power and undermines class solidarity. More than that, a union leader who is merely a “trade union secretary”, focusing on narrow economic demands undermines the power of the whole working class. The UAW strike (just like the derailed UPS strike), could be turned into a fight for the whole working class and the oppressed who have been hit hard: Blacks, women, Latinos, immigrants, the unemployed and the other specially oppressed. And there needs to be a perspective to extend the strike internationally, into Mexico and China for example. We call on union militants to build class struggle caucuses within our unions based on a political program of transitional demands of today to fight for leadership both on the shop floor and within the official union leadership!
This will take a new class struggle leadership that can envision a world beyond capitalism. Objectivists, economists, reformists and anarchists line up to promote this moment as the spontaneous empowerment of the working class. Where this empowerment exists apart from their pronouncements we can’t say, unless it’s just a theory, something to make conversation. Revolutionary socialism rejects objectivist spontaneism which results in uncritical adulation of every upsurge. They report on the struggle but with no intention of building a class struggle leadership which escalates towards political independence. We say, the path to victory is not via spontaneity and struggles confined to minimum economic demands. And those who remain opposed to workers launching their own party outright, or with excuses such as, “now is not the time,” are traitorous interlopers and the transmission belt of bourgeois ideology and pessimism into the workers movement. To win the workers must take advantage of this moment when the unions poll higher than the politicians to build our own workers’ party and new workers international to press the fight for workers’ governments.
Modern Workers Struggles are Inherently Anti-Racist
UAW pickets, largely Black, were yelled at with racist slurs and physically attacked by a man and his family, and this and other accounts of physical attacks are documented in conditions where nazis parade openly. Workers are left to their own initiative, which as a legal matter is proscribed and all such engagement, even vocal, is discouraged by leadership.
“Leadership” organizes zero physical response and no defense against such attacks, exactly after the fashion of liberal politicians’ 100% reliance on the police. Of course constabulary model police departments hunt perpetrators after the fact! The history of police strikebreaking has been flushed; the mantra now is they’re the saviors of democracy, (Jan. 6th, etc.) Ergo we need armed, trained workers’ self-defense and a uniting of these pickets into union-based Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards!
Fight for Socialism
“The revolutionaries always consider that the reforms and acquisitions are only a by-product of the revolutionary struggle. If we say that we will only demand what they can give, the ruling class will give only one-tenth or none of what we demand. When we demand more and can impose our demands, the capitalists are compelled to give the maximum. The more extended and militant the spirit of the workers, the more is demanded and won. They are not sterile slogans; they are means of pressure on the bourgeoisie, and will give the greatest possible material results immediately.” Leon Trotsky: The Political Backwardness of American Workers (1938) (marxists.org)
Today, to survive the terminal crisis of capitalism, the environmental crisis, and the unfolding inter-imperialist conflict and hot wars, the working class needs political independence borne out of class struggle to unite the entire working class against the rule of the capitalist class.
A class struggle leadership could use this moment to call for a national organizing drive and a congress of labor’s representatives to launch a fighting workers labor party. A fighting workers party would be tribune of all the oppressed and organize with class struggle methods in every work place, school and community against repressive anti-labor laws that outlaw solidarity strikes which can become general strikes.
Such a party would not be limited to electoralism, but linked to the unions and oppressed communities it would launch a class wide debate on how a working class program could resolve the basic contradictions of capitalism wherein all production is social but the gains and profit are private.
A transitional program to resolve this contradiction would end joblessness by implementing 30 hours work for 40 hours pay, end homelessness, poverty and hunger with trillions of dollars for public works programs, including environmental restoration and transition to clean energy sources. Child care, bodily autonomy, educational opportunity and care for the aging and infirm would all be addressed by a workers party arising out of class struggle.
Our party would demand easy credits (at tolerable interest rates) for families and small businesses against the bankers currently driving up loan rates. Our party would demand the opening of the books to expose the parasitic nature of the corporations, the collusion of the insiders and politicians, and show cause to the entire working class for the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, without indemnification and under workers control. To win these demands, a fighting workers labor party will organize disciplined and armed labor defense guards as the masses are mobilized to win by means of general strikes, occupations and industry takeovers.Likewise inter-imperialist conflict and the forces of destruction, the war industries, threaten human survival. They turn our tax dollars into their war profits in Ukrainian and Russian bloodletting and have no interest in ending it. Against this inherently self-destructive element of imperialism workers need a dual defeatist attitude toward war. To win peace the UAW and all labor organizations must take the lessons from the failure of the socialist workers to prevent WWI. We endorse the example of the Left Zimmerwaldists who waged revolutions against that war and won. Like them, we must declare, “Our Main Enemy is At Home!” We must say to the workers of the world we unite with you, not our capitalist bosses!
Build strike committees that unite strikers and workers in each district/region.
Build class struggle caucuses in every union.
Hold a conference of all workers in the struggle to resolve questions of tactics and strategy.
For an all out strike! Bring out all the UAW! Seize the plants! Revive the sit-down strike!
Smash Taft-Hartley in the streets! Revive the solidarity strike! Build the general strike to unite with all workers on strike and/or organizing.
Turn the strike momentum into an organizing drive across the industry and internationally.
Defend immigrant workers’ fight to organize labor on both sides of the borders!
Against Anti-Chinese racism stoking the fires of war.
Picket lines mean don’t cross- for Labor Black/Brown self defense against scabs, racists and cop interference.
Turn the 2023 strike wave into a fight for political independence.
Jobs for all! 30 hours work for 40 hours pay.
For a sliding scale of wages and prices under control of workers’ wage and price committees.
Nationalize the commanding heights of the economy without indemnification to be run under working class control.
For a fighting workers labor party to fight for a workers’ government!
For socialism and a planned economy against the anarchy of production and the forces of destruction of world capitalism.
CWG-USA, September 23, 2023
