Workers have a property right to their jobs

Martha Grevatt WW photo: G. Dunkel

From a talk given by Martha Grevatt, UAW member and organizer of Pride At Work, AFL-CIO, at the May 13-14 conference on “Preparing for the Rebirth of the Global Struggle for Socialism” in New York City.

Delphi, the world’s biggest auto-parts company, is using the bankruptcy courts to cut 25,000 jobs, drastically slash wages and benefits, and bust the United Auto Workers. Ford and GM plan to cut 30,000 and 35,000 jobs respectively.

What if the UAW took a cue from immigrant workers and shut down the whole auto industry?

The bosses have had the upper hand for too long. This latest wave of threatened layoffs continues a trend that began in the late 1980s, coinciding with the high-tech restructuring that continues to decimate jobs in manufacturing.

Delphi is continuing a pattern of union busting through bankruptcy, a pattern that also goes back to the late 1980s. Steel workers and airline workers can testify to its devastating effects.

However, a bankrupt company is legally no longer the owner, but a “debtor in possession.” The largest creditor is the UAW, representing workers to whom Delphi has billions of dollars in pension obligations. Even from a legal standpoint, the workers have the right not only to strike but to seize the plants. Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy first raised this point in the 1980s. We popularized it by forming the grass-roots Job Is a Right Campaign, and we say again: Workers have a property right to their jobs.

The fight is sure to escalate, but we keep in mind that even the most thought out, most class-conscious strategies will fail if they are conducted in a vacuum. Auto workers can reverse the backward trend if their struggle is part of a new class-wide movement, a movement without borders.

We have the absolute right to seize the means of produc tion, not only to save our jobs but to save the planet.