'A job is a right! Housing is a right!'

Excerpted from a talk given by Martha Grevatt, a 20-year Chrysler worker, executive board member of UAW Local 122 in Twinsburg, Ohio, and writer on the UAW and auto industry for Workers World, at a Dec. 1 forum. The forum, “Fighting Takebacks, Two-Tier Wages, Plant Closings and Lay-offs; Analysis of the recent concessionary contracts between the UAW and GM, Ford & Chrysler; Lessons of the Flint Sit-Down Strike–Learning from our past to fight for our future,” was sponsored by the Detroit chapter of Workers World Party.

Grevatt campaigned in her local union for voting down the recent giveback contract between the UAW and Chrysler, which local 122 rejected. She is the author of the upcoming book, “In Our Hands is Placed a Power: The Flint Sit-Down Strike. “

Seventy years ago Flint, Mich., was the scene of one of the most important battles in U.S. labor history: the Great Sit-Down. For 44 days—from Dec. 30, 1936, to Feb.11, 1937– auto workers occupied key General Motors plants. They didn’t walk out and put up a picket line; they sat down and formed a community inside the plants.

In 1936, some 43 percent of the U.S. automobile industry belonged to General Motors. Its profits for that year totaled nearly $284 million. Its assets—including 69 plants in 35 states—were valued at $1.5 billion. The company had 37 percent of the worldwide car and truck market. GM President Alfred P. Sloan was the highest paid executive in the country.

The assembly line was a living hell. The ever-increasing pace of work on the line—speedup—gave many workers the appearance of a 50-year-old before turning 30. A sit-down participant described “hands so swollen I couldn’t get my fingers between each other.” A sociologist of the time observed “occupational psychosis” from the monotony and overwork.

On Feb. 10, GM finally signed an initial agreement to recognize the UAW as the sole bargaining agent, for a period of six months, at the most important plants. This initial victory laid the foundation for the many gains that followed.

Now contrast that with the six-hour strike, the shortest in UAW history, called against Chrysler by the international union’s leadership on Oct. 10, 2007. The rank-and-file still don’t know what, if anything, they were striking for, or why they went back so soon. It was all decided bureaucratically, with no input from below. The term “Hollywood strike” was coined, not to describe the screenwriters’ strike on the West Coast, but to refer to a strike that was “just for show.”

Yet for the brief time I spent picketing I witnessed tremendous power and solidarity. We did stop production, after all. We turned away trucks and told our hated supervisors, “You can’t go to work today.” When they protested we told them, “We’re in charge today.”

As different as these two strikes were, any hope for the future of my deeply troubled union lies in their similarity: the exercise of workers’ power.

The brief work stoppage ended when the UAW and Chrysler reached an agreement, similar to that just ratified by GM UAW workers and to the contract Ford workers later passed. These three contracts are by far the most concessionary in the auto union’s history. They represent a qualitative leap backward from the concession bargaining that has plagued negotiations over the past couple of decades. The contract didn’t go through without opposition–one-third of GM workers and almost half of all Chrysler workers voted no–but in the end the fear factor took over and the contract passed.

New hires will now start at $14 an hour, 1.5 times the federal poverty level for a family of four and $3 less than the median national wage, maxing out at $16.23. They will have worse benefits. They may, if lucky, be able to move into a “traditional” wage job, but they will never get a traditional defined benefit pension. It’s divisive. It’s the enemy of solidarity.

A VEBA–which stands for Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (or as Soldiers of Solidarity says, “Vandalize Employee Benefits Again”)– was set up to fund retiree health care. The three companies each put in a one-time contribution to the VEBA, but they are now off the hook for any future payments. VEBAs at companies such as Caterpillar and Copperweld are nearly bankrupt.

In the case of Copperweld, much of the VEBA was held in stock in CSI, the company that bought Copperweld and later went bankrupt. The Big Three set up the VEBA with a portion of it in company stock. Soon after, GM stock tanked on a reported $39 billion loss in the third quarter–really just a paper loss tied to closing tax loopholes. Imagine that! A corporation finally has to pay their share of taxes and they can write it off as a “loss.” So now the GM retirees’ VEBA is already worth less than when it started. If one of the Big Three were to go bankrupt, it would pull the VEBA down as well.

The VEBA will save the companies billions of dollars every year indefinitely. Yet the workers pay for it by giving up nearly all of their Cost Of Living Allowance. The bosses are double-dipping! Not only that, when they compute the workers’ “profit sharing” bonus at the end of the year, profits reaped from savings due to the VEBA are immune from being “shared.” They’re not double dipping, they’re triple dipping.

Then there are the plant closings and phony promises of job security—phony because they depend on “market conditions.” Plants like mine are covered by a moratorium on plant closings–but the companies could run the plants with only 50 people inside. Mass layoffs have already begun, and the ink on the contracts is barely dry!

All the things that had been guaranteed, that were won through long strikes lasting weeks and sometimes months, and made possible by that great struggle of 70 years ago—all these gains are being surrendered and replaced with a market-driven agreement. And it couldn’t happen at a worse time.

The whole thing is a massive transfer of wealth from the workers to the bosses. GM says within four years its labor costs will be cut in half–labor costs the bosses claim amount to $75 an hour. Multiply the savings of $37 an hour by 2,080 hours per worker per year by 173,000 UAW workers at the Big Three. You’re talking maybe a $6.5 million dollar per hour rip-off of workers’ labor!

Marxists call it surplus value, the unpaid portion of the working hours—the part the bosses keep for themselves in the form of profit and executive compensation. Wyndham Mortimer, the communist UAW vice president at the time of the sit-down, called it the “loot.” In four years time, the bosses double the loot.

But enough is never enough for them. After the recent contract was ratified, Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli said that the industry has “an insatiable appetite for cash.” They have weakened the union to such a degree, they feel they can go in for the kill. It’s like imperialist foreign policy on another front–like how they had Iraq so weakened by sanctions, disarmed by those who made bogus charges of weapons of mass destruction, then came “shock and awe.”

Shock and awe has come home, and in the case of Chrysler’s owners, Cerberus, a lot of the players are the same: John P Snow, chair; Dan Quayle, chair of global operations; and Donald Rumsfeld is a major shareholder.

The latest job cuts go well beyond what even a depressed market would allow for under the current concessionary contract. Chrysler is going to cut one in three jobs in North America. The 13,000 job cuts announced last February were nearly doubled last month. And just a few days ago, Nardelli said the 25,000 might not be “enough.” Enough is never enough. These cuts are propelled by the drive to maximize profits, pure and simple. Now the “poor” company is getting ready to build a plant in Russia–with money stolen from the workers.

And it’s not just Chrysler. When Ford CEO Alan Mulally proclaimed that the target of 44,000 job reductions through buyouts had been reached, the next sentence was that more cuts were needed.

These are not merely “market-related” layoffs. They are part of a longterm corporate strategy they used to call “downsizing.” Now that that term has negative connotations they call it “right-sizing.” (I call it “wrong-sizing.”) Even the contracts we are saddled with limit the conditions under which jobs can be cut. The goal of permanently shrinking the work force is not one of them. Yet the attitude of the UAW leadership seems to be “you can’t fight city hall” or “they own the company, they can do what they want.” Local leaders are either following that line or feel powerless to go against the current.

We need a radical departure from the strategy of labor-management cooperation. Marxists have always opposed it in principle but in the past, conservative bureaucrats were able to maneuver within its parameters and deliver the goods. Now a raging capitalist crisis, in which the subprime mortgage disaster is only the tip of the iceberg, is making the strategy unworkable. It has run its course. The bosses just keep making the union smaller and weaker, and at one point, and we should prepare ourselves for this, they may decide to dispense with the UAW altogether and just flat-out bust the union. We can’t put anything past them.

We need a new strategy now, before it gets to that point. Trying to fight it through the grievance procedure alone would be futile. We need a new old program, a 70-year-old program that at the time of the sit-down was a widely held assumption: that a job is a worker’s property right.

We have to spread this thinking around. We have to revive it. We have to challenge a strategy dictated by Wall Street, dictated by the ones who have a stake in capitalist ideology. We have to disown the capitalist crisis. It isn’t our doing, and it isn’t our responsibility to bail them out over and over. Their property rights don’t take precedence over our property rights: We have a property right to our jobs.

We need to take it further. Many of the jobs being cut do not involve mass layoffs. Rather, they involve buyouts—paying workers to leave but not replacing them. But our communities have a community property right to these jobs and these tax revenues upon which they depend.

And furthermore the right to work is a human right. It’s even in the U.N. Charter on Human Rights. That brings me to another human right, and the tremendous campaign you are initiating here, around the issue of housing. And this issue is completely inseparable from the issue of jobs.

Both the auto industry and the construction industry are what are called “multiplier industries.” A downturn in auto affects every sector of the economy: rubber, glass, and steel, everything that becomes part of a vehicle. It affects the public sector with lost tax revenues. A drop in purchasing power affects everything from travel to retail to–and this gets into your fight around foreclosures–housing. Imagine on the other hand if everyone had a job at union wages. How many workers would be losing their homes?

Likewise a drop in home building and remodeling affects a multitude of workers–from materials to retail to the public sector–and it affects auto. The drop in light truck sales reflects a drop in construction and remodeling, and the domestic automakers depend heavily on truck sales. When construction workers aren’t working they aren’t buying cars.

So we need to link these two most basic rights into a struggle that says housing is a right, a job is a right. The struggles in the neighborhoods and the struggles in the work place can make common cause. The capitalist crisis should not cost us our homes or our livelihoods. Only the rottenest of systems would give a bank the “right” to put someone out of their home.

So we need to build a movement, a grassroots movement, a united movement. And it’s that need for unity that brings me back to the other protest you just held, against the fascist immigrant basher Lou Dobbs. If we don’t take on this vicious racism, then we don’t have real solidarity. And without solidarity we can’t win.

Fighting the banks and the auto barons to save our jobs and our homes is hard enough when you have solidarity, across all lines that reject racism, immigrant-hating, homophobia, transphobia, the patriarchy, anti-Islam, etc. A divided movement, a movement weak on the national question, surely cannot get anywhere.

The ruling class has any number of tricks when it comes to keeping us divided, but at this moment the greatest danger to our unity is anti-immigrant racism. It’s the big issue. Just listen to the Democratic and Republican debates. All the candidates know how to do is bait one another on the question of immigration. And they try to outdo one another by demonstrating their hard-line stance against undocumented immigrants.

The issue played out in a little-known aspect of the auto contracts. I wrote a resolution to the national bargaining convention, which my local forwarded, to amend the non-discrimination language–and believe it or not it was amended. What’s called the Equal Application section includes marital status. And while it doesn’t say gender identity or gender expression, there’s carefully worded language that protect transgender workers. Imagine that! The UAW! The blue-collar unions have always lagged behind the service-sector unions when it comes to defending LGBT workers. Eleven years ago we were picketing Chrysler dealerships just to get “sexual orientation” included, and this was in the face of death threats, sexual degradation, and for at least one worker physical assault. And now without even a petition campaign we have protection for trans workers.

But here’s the other side of the coin. That same resolution also called on the union to add the words “immigration status” to the Equal Application clause. Not done. The UAW was too afraid to confront the mounting campaign of hatred and educate their more backward members, too afraid to confront the state, the media, and the Lou Dobbses.

They divide us. They set us up in competition with workers who come here from other countries. Likewise, they turn us against workers in other countries. They would foster protectionism to have us think it is workers in other countries who are “stealing our jobs,” when the only true threat to our jobs is the capitalist drive to maximize profits. The exploiting class that circles the globe scours the planet for the cheapest source of labor and materials.

E-mail: mgrevatt@workers.org