UAW Tops Enforce Obama’s Raw Deal

Wall Street, Washington Shaft Auto Workers

JUNE 2—Global auto giant General Motors, for decades one of the pillars of American capitalism, yesterday followed Chrysler into Chapter 11 bankruptcy under the guiding hand of President Barack Obama’s Wall Street cronies in his “auto task force.” The plunge in sales brought on by a global economy going to hell left the automakers scrambling for federal aid to stave off financial ruin. From the outset, we have opposed the bailout of the auto bosses, underlining that it “will be purchased through the further destruction of the jobs and livelihoods of working people” (“Bosses Declare War on UAW Workers,” WV No. 926, 5 December 2008). This is precisely what’s on order with the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies—to reshape the industry to again make it a lucrative source of profits for Wall Street by breaking the back of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

Obama, whose election was bankrolled to the tune of $5 million by the sellouts who head the UAW, celebrated “the beginning of a new G.M.” But for tens of thousands of auto workers it is the end of the line. Under the “bailout” deal, GM and Chrysler have announced that they will shut down 20 to 28 plants. The UAW, which was once the symbol of union power in the U.S., will be a shadow of its former self. The UAW’s membership has already withered from a high of 1.6 million in the 1960s to less than 500,000 today, with a scant 140,000 working for the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler). In the 1970s, GM alone employed nearly 400,000 workers. With the plant closings the workforce will be reduced to fewer than 40,000. The gutting of the UAW is a heavy blow against all workers, organized and unorganized.

The UAW misleaders are helping to foot the bill for “restructuring” the automakers—at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs—by accepting worthless stock in GM and Chrysler to fund over half the union’s retiree health care trust (itself a sellout brokered in the 2007 contract to save the company $3 billion a year in health care costs). The head of the “New GM” boasted that this was a “defining moment” that would, as the New York Times (2 June) noted, allow the company “to ‘permanently’ unshackle itself from the cost of supporting hundreds of thousands of retirees.” Those “lucky” enough to keep their jobs will be shackled by a “no strike” pledge for the next six years while the auto bosses continue to hack away at their wages and benefits to bring them into line with labor costs at non-union auto plants.

Here is the bitter fruit of the trade-union bureaucracy’s program of class collaboration, which has long tied the interests of the unions to the profitability of their capitalist exploiters. “I’m very comfortable,” UAW head Ron Gettelfinger told National Public Radio on May 1, the day after Chrysler entered Chapter 11. “It’s not like we’re going into this bankruptcy fighting with Chrysler and [merger partner] Fiat and the U.S. Treasury. We’re going in there in lockstep to put our agreements in place.” (read on)