US auto workers denounce UAW betrayal at Ford

Auto workers should emphatically reject the surrender by the United Auto Workers union to Ford Motor Co. and mobilize their full strength to defend their jobs and living standards.

Like the contracts at GM and Chrysler, the UAW-Ford agreement gives the automaker a green light for more plant closings and mass layoffs. Ratification of the contracts at General Motors and Chrysler was followed within days by mass layoff announcements from both companies. The same will happen at Ford if this contract is passed.

The agreement cuts the wages of newly hired workers in half and sanctions the destruction of virtually all of the gains won by generations of autoworkers. UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President Bob King have traded the jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits of UAW members for the right to control a multibillion-dollar health trust fund. The UAW will become a profit-making business and its top officials wealthy executives.

If accepted, the conditions of Ford workers will be rolled back to the days before the union was built in the mass struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. Such a defeat, however, will not be the product of an open battle, in which strikebreakers and thugs are used to smash the union. Ford no longer has to rely on gangsters like Harry Bennett and his Service men to beat up and terrorize workers. In the UAW, Ford has a ready-made structure to suppress the rank and file and impose the company’s dictates.