Who are the ‘automakers’?

Not so long ago General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were known as the Big Three automakers. Now that they’re not so big, they’re called the Detroit Three, but they’re still called automakers. Hyundai, Nissan, Tata, Fiat, Opel, Volkswagen, etc., are all called automakers.

Why? When is the last time any CEO or executive actually made an automobile? In fact Michael Moore documented the inability of industry executives to even perform an oil change.

So who are the automakers? I thought—laid-off autoworkers have lots of time to think—of all the cars on the road, millions of cars, some stopped in traffic, others zipping along what Woody Guthrie called “that ribbon of highway.” So many ribbons of highway. So many vehicles rolling off the assembly lines, year after year. General Motors and Ford are over a century old.

Who makes the cars? It’s not Fritz Henderson, Alan Mulally or Aiko Toyoda—all auto executives. It’s certainly not Bob Nardelli, who will soon be joining Rick Wagoner in that golden unemployment line for displaced CEOs.

Every vehicle on the road has been touched by hundreds of workers’ hands around the world, part of a complex web of supply chain networks that cross borders and oceans to get to the assembly plant.

Tangled up in the web are millions of hard-working souls. We have more in common than the vehicles we build. We even have more in common than the pink slips telling us, in so many different languages, “You’re no longer needed.”

Every one of us is a wage-laborer, although some of us have higher wages than others. But besides being the paycheck we depend on—like the one that almost bounced when Chrysler declared bankruptcy or the one we might start seeing again when a leaner, meaner company emerges from this state-sponsored restructuring—what are wages?

I brushed the cobwebs from my bookshelf and pulled out a tattered copy of “Wage-Labor and Capital.” This pamphlet is based on a series of lectures given by a young Karl Marx in 1847. At 29 Marx had not fully developed his theories on political economy. For the 1891 edition, published eight years after his dear friend’s death, Friedrich Engels altered the text.

“According to the original,” wrote Engels, “the worker sells his labor to the capitalist for wages; according to the present text he sells his labor power. It is not a case here of mere juggling of words, but rather one of the most important points in the whole of political economy.

“We live today under the domination of capitalist production, in which a large, ever-increasing class of the population can live only if it works for the owners of the means of production—the tools, machines, raw materials and means of subsistence—in return for wages. On the basis of this mode of production, the cost of production of the worker consists of that quantity of the means of subsistence—or their price in money—which, on the average, is necessary to make him capable of working, and to replace him, after his departure by reason of old age, sickness, or death, with a new worker—that is to say, to propagate the working class in the necessary numbers.”

In Marx and Engels’ time we were more likely to be paid by the day or by piece rate than by the hour, but the inherent tendency of capitalists is still the same. It is never to pay the workers for their labor—a “fair share” of the wealth they produce. It is to drive the price of labor power—wages—down to just what is essential to keep a worker alive and reproduce future generations of workers. This is true for me and my union sisters and brothers in Twinsburg, Ohio, where Chrysler is trying to close our plant. And it’s true for my sisters and brothers in Toluca, Mexico, to whom Chrysler barely pays what they need to survive and raise families.

“In our present-day capitalist society labor power is a commodity,” Engels went on to explain, “yet quite a peculiar commodity. It has, namely the peculiar property of being a value-creating power, a source of more value than it itself possesses.

“It is the working class alone which produces all values.”

That’s right. Workers get the raw materials out of the ground. By our hands they become the hundreds of parts that meet each other at assembly plants all over the world. By our hands they roll off the line and travel to a shrinking number of dealerships.

We are not just another group of “stakeholders” or “unsecured creditors,” to be lumped together with stockholders, bondholders or bankers.

We are THE automakers.

We have the right to fight for union jobs and union wages. To this end, on June 14-17, all roads lead to Detroit for the People’s Summit and Tent City.