Auto pact: the good, the bad and the ugly

Friday, October 12, 2007 : Chrysler, UAW agree on tentative pact DETROIT — About 43,000 autoworkers streamed out of their workplaces Oct. 10 at Chrysler plants across the nation, launching a second nationwide auto strike within a two-week period, but this one lasting only about four hours. Members of the United Auto Workers union shut down plants and were on picket lines just minutes after the 11 a.m.

strike deadline. But by around 4 p.m., a tentative settlement with the company was announced.

About an hour after the workers shut down Chrysler’s plants, the union’s bargaining team was meeting with company representatives, hammering out last-minute details. The company is reported to have put up strong resistance to union demands for job security guarantees and adequate health care funding.

For the second time in two weeks, autoworkers across the country flexed their muscle and showed their willingness to fight. The first time around the strike was against General Motors.

“This is not just a fight against Chrysler,” a worker picketing the Sterling Heights Assembly plant outside Detroit, told the World. “We are out here for everyone in this country who opposes sending manufacturing jobs overseas, and we are out here fighting for all working people.”

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters immediately honored the picket lines at Chrysler, ending for half a day the company’s ability to move everything from finished cars to automotive parts in or out of its plants.

When the Teamsters backed the GM strikers two weeks ago, the union’s president, James Hoffa, said, “This is a fight against corporate America’s attack on the workers.”

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Friday, October 12, 2007 :This article is also available in pdf format to download and distribute. The United Auto Workers-General Motors contract marks a turning point in the decades-long degeneration of the UAW. With this contract, the UAW goes into business as the proprietor of a multibillion-dollar investment fund. In return, it collaborates in the rapid replacement of older workers with a younger workforce at one-half the previous wage rate and without a pension plan, sanctions the abolition of employer-paid medical benefits for retirees, imposes across-the-board cuts in real wages, and accepts the continued destruction of jobs.

The contract represents the destruction of all of the basic gains won by previous generations of auto workers.

At the heart of the contract is the establishment of a multibillion-dollar union-controlled trust fund for retiree health benefits. The so-called “voluntary employees beneficiary association,” or VEBA, will turn the union into a profit-making enterprise and make the union bureaucracy full-fledged shareholders in the exploitation of the workers. The UAW bureaucracy will get its hands on a massive cash hoard, including shares in GM, which will ensure its income even as it administers ever deeper cuts in the benefits of retired union members.

The open transformation of the UAW into a business is not a sudden or unexpected development. The Socialist Equality Party and its predecessor, the Workers League, have been analyzing this process for decades. As early as 1992, we explained that to define the UAW and the AFL-CIO as working class organizations was “to blind the working class to the realities which they confront.”

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