‘Bosses ran away with our jobs, wages’

Excerpts from a talk given by Martha Grevatt of Cleveland at the WWP National Conference, Nov. 14.

Last spring union workers at Ford, General Motors and Chrysler were asked — in the middle of a contract — to make major concessions. What took decades of struggle to win — supplemental unemployment benefits, cost of living allowance, lifetime health benefits, and even the eight-hour day — were lost or compromised. But, we were told, the survival of the industry was at stake.

The concessions, first demanded by the Treasury under Bush as a condition of Troubled Asset Relief Program loans, were accepted at Ford. When GM and Chrysler sought additional federal aid, the Treasury — directed to do so by the vampire banks — demanded even more blood: more job cuts, a six-year, $14-an-hour wage freeze for new hires, and a six-year no-strike pledge.

On April 29 Chrysler workers reluctantly agreed. The only alternative, we were told, would be even worse — bankruptcy. That was the first double-cross. But nothing was said about plant closings. We were told that specific language in the contract modifications would keep our plant in Twinsburg, Ohio, open.

On May 1 Chrysler announced in bankruptcy court that they would close eight plants, including ours. Double-cross number two! We held militant rallies, but by August it was clear that the new company, led by Fiat, was going ahead with the closing. So for months my union sisters and brothers have wrestled with tough choices: to retire early with a greatly reduced pension, to take a lump sum and quit a good job in the middle of an economic catastrophe, or to follow their work to Detroit — uprooting their families or moving away from loved ones to hold onto that scarce and prized possession: a job with UAW wages and benefits.

The transfers from closed plants to plants facing their own layoff crises are inherently divisive and have led to fist fights and vandalized cars. Now this week we were informed that our transfer numbers have been cut. Over 100 skilled tradeswomen and tradesmen thought they had a job waiting for them in Michigan, but those jobs will go to laid-off workers in Detroit.

In factory slang, they’re SOL — “shit outta luck.” The UAW International was in the unenviable position of deciding who would get the jobs. But shouldn’t they be asking the obvious question: Why can’t everyone have a job? Thirty of the jobs in contention are for robotics technicians.

Wasn’t the promise of high tech that if you just got the right skills, you’d get a good job, you’d be set for life?

Marxism has a way of explaining the unexplainable. In “Wage-Labor and Capital,” Marx wrote: “The growth, accumulation, and concentration of capital bring in their train an ever more detailed subdivision of labor, an ever greater improvement of old machines, and a constant application of new machines. ... The greater division of labor enables one laborer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 laborers; it therefore increases competition among the laborers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. ... The special skill of the laborer becomes worthless. ...

“An exception to the law has been adduced, namely, the workers who are employed in the manufacture of machinery itself ... and the workers employed in this branch of industry are skilled, even educated, workers. ... Since the year 1840, this assertion, which even before that date was only half-true, has lost all semblance of truth; for the most diverse machines are now applied to the manufacture of the machines themselves.” And then unemployment rises among all sectors of the working class.

Sam Marcy in “High Tech, Low Pay” and Fred Goldstein in “Low-Wage Capitalism” brought Marx’s insight up to date showing how the role of new technology in capitalist production is still to displace workers, regardless of skill.

The labor officialdom has misled the working class too long. Labor-management cooperation was flawed from the start. Now, as the predatory attacks from the ruling class continue relentlessly, the “team” concept has no material basis whatsoever. Yet its ideological residue dictates the strategy of the labor bureaucracy. When Ford wanted more concessions, along the lines of GM and Chrysler, the UAW International leaders were their chief advocates. But this time, the rank and file rejected the givebacks almost three-to-one! They said, “We’re keeping the right to strike,” and they’re discussing a possible strike at a truck plant in Claycomo, Mich., over job cuts and abusive discipline. It’s a start!

It’s past time to revive the class struggle. The Marxists who led the UAW in the 1930s understood the irreconcilable contradiction between labor and capital. They knew that the only way forward was through class solidarity. They reached out to the workers — to Black workers, women and immigrants. And in 1936 in Flint, Mich., a meeting was held at the Bulgarian Hall to form a united front of all the working class parties to take on GM. On Dec. 30 the workers in the plants sat down, and they held the plants for 44 days and brought General Motors to its knees.