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Vol. 71/No. 42      November 12, 2007

 
Confronting the bosses’ assaults
(editorial)
 
The auto bosses have taken another step in their assaults on workers’ wages, working conditions, and benefits with the recently approved Chrysler contract. As in the General Motors contract accepted a few weeks earlier, union members at Chrysler now face a permanent two-tier wage system, with many new hires starting at half the pay of current employees. Retirees are no longer covered by company health insurance. Their benefits are dependent on a trust fund invested in the stock market.

For decades, United Auto Workers (UAW) officials, like those of other trade unions, have pursued a course of subordinating workers’ needs to the bosses’ demand to make the U.S. auto industry more “competitive” with their rivals abroad. The only way GM, Chrysler, and Ford can become more profitable, however, is by lowering wages, slashing health-care and pension benefits, and brutally speeding up the line to produce more cars in less time with fewer workers.

UAW president Ron Gettelfinger calls for “fighting for U.S. auto jobs.” This American nationalist course ties workers’ fortunes to the bosses and pits workers in the United States against our class brothers and sisters abroad. Far from protecting union jobs, the union officialdom’s “strategy” has only contributed to a situation today where nonunion auto plants have expanded in the South and the UAW membership has shrunk to one-third of the 1.5 million members it had in 1979.

Trying to defend jobs, income, and working conditions by tying these to the employers’ profitability is a trap. Bosses and workers have opposite interests. The starting point must be fighting for the interests of workers, not the bosses. Working people share common interests around the world, so we must join in solidarity with fellow workers, from Japan to Mexico, China, and Germany.

The only way to counter the assaults by the bosses is by using union power against them, through which workers can take ownership of their struggles. That includes organizing unions wherever we don’t have them.

Many working people are learning the hard way that the unions must oppose two-tier wage structures, whose aim is to divide the workforce and ultimately push down the wages of all. Labor needs to fight for a substantial raise in the minimum wage and for cost-of-living adjustments in all union contracts.

To combat unemployment, what’s needed is a fight for a massive, federally funded public works program to put millions to work at union scale. Unemployment benefits should be paid at union rate for the duration of joblessness.

Health care should not be dependent on individual employers and their financial viability. The unions need to fight for universal, government-guaranteed medical coverage and retirement income.

These are key elements of a fighting working-class program to be able to take on the bosses and win.
 
 
Related articles:
UAW approves Chrysler concession contract  
 
 
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