Stop the carve-up of Chrysler! For workers’ control and public ownership of the auto industry!

The plant closings and mass layoffs mean thousands of workers and their families will be deprived of their incomes and lose healthcare coverage and retirement benefits. Cities like Detroit, St. Louis, Newark, Delaware and Windsor, Ontario—already hit by years of industrial decline—will be further devastated as businesses dependent on Chrysler close their doors and schools and other public services lose millions in tax revenues.

This social catastrophe, which follows the destruction of nearly 100,000 North American jobs last year by GM, Ford and the parts supplier Delphi, is an indictment of the entire capitalist profit system. It cannot provide the most basic needs of working people, whose labor creates society’s wealth.

Chrysler workers are not responsible for the corporate decisions that produced this disaster. Yet they pay the cost in lost homes and broken families, while the corporate CEOs and big investors who drove the company into the ground walk away with millions, if not billions, from the downsizing and carve-up of the company.

Wall Street investment house JPMorgan Chase is already circulating a prospectus to potential buyers interested in grabbing Chrysler’s most valuable assets. In addition to US and international auto companies, possible buyers include several private equity firms—some headed by former Chrysler bosses—which would likely dump the company’s healthcare and pension obligations and slash wages before reselling it at an enormous markup.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/chry-m15.shtml