The owners of GM have invested major resources in their drive to cut 54,000 jobs - out of a workforce of 220,000 - and push down working conditions. Almost two months old, the Flint strikes have become the most costly labor battle in the auto industry since the 67-day GM strike in 1970. Why have the bosses taken such a hard-nosed position?
The auto giant is forced by the laws of the world capitalist market to try to slash jobs while maintaining production levels if they hope to become as efficient as the most productive industries. GM is driven by the fact that it makes barely half what its largest competitor, Ford, does per vehicle. Ford and Chrysler have been ahead of GM in "downsizing" their workforces and speeding up production in face of stiff competition from auto bosses in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. "Now it's GM's time," declared columnist John Farmer in the July 16 Newark Star-Ledger. "Wall Street has been blunt about what GM should do: Use the strike to begin a dramatic restructuring; take a hit now in the interest of future competitiveness."
GM is determined to take on the auto workers in order to tear up previous work rules, gut safety and health protection, and weaken other union rights in the name of efficiency and modernization. To intimidate the union, the bosses seek to block unemployment compensation for laid-off UAW members and threaten to permanently shut down more plants. Now the auto giant is attempting to use the federal courts, either through an arbitrator's ruling or a direct court order declaring the strike illegal, to force the unionists back to work - the first time it has done so since the 1937 Flint sit-down strikes.
As we have seen many times, from the 1937 sit-down strikes to recent rail strikes, the courts are an instrument of the employers' interests, almost always coming down on their side. Even the initial move to force union officials to agree to "expedited arbitration" is a threat to union power because it gives a so-called neutral individual the right to end the strike, taking it out of the hands of the union membership. The labor movement should oppose all attempts by the bosses to use the courts against the striking workers.
If the auto workers push back GM, working people everywhere will be strengthened in our struggle against employer attacks. If GM bosses defeat the UAW in the Flint strikes, the whole labor movement will be set back. The task at hand for labor is to explain the stakes in this fight and draw fellow unionists and other workers into solidarity with the UAW strikers.
Workers at GM's Romulus facility in Michigan showed the way by protesting being forced to use replacements for auto parts usually made in Flint. The solidarity actions organized by the UAW in Flint on July 21 are another example of what is needed. If anything confirms the desire by broad numbers of working people to stand up to the bosses, it the near-unanimous vote by 5,000 workers to authorize a strike against GM's Saturn assembly plant. This is the plant that the big-business media had long held up as a model for "labor peace" until workers there decided there was no peace, only a one-sided war against them. Solidarity with the GM workers can be organized through plant-gate collections, delegations of unionists to the UAW picket lines, union meetings featuring strikers or others, and many other ways. Above all, working people can aid the GM strikers by telling the truth about this fight and by joining other labor struggles and skirmishes breaking out in cities everywhere.