Auto workers to UAW: Hold the line on jobs, wages and benefits!

Contract negotiations between Chrysler and the United Auto Workers started on July 20; three days later talks began with Ford and General Motors.

UAW members work hard for their money. Photo: UAW

While opening the negotiations with the traditional handshake, the bosses have made it clear that they are looking at the bargaining table as if it were a butcher block. On their agenda is nothing less than a thoroughgoing restructuring of the auto industry, following the devastating pattern of steel.

News reports leading up to this point describe a multipronged attack targeting everything autoworkers have enjoyed for decades. The specifics have already been spelled out well in advance of the negotiations’ official start. One day a newspaper will proclaim that the job bank—a program where laid-off workers receive 40 hours’ pay while engaging in “nontraditional” work—is history. The next day the topic will be “health care in the crosshairs.” Yet another will portray a two-tier wage structure as inevitable.

The rationale for the cutbacks, repeated over the past month on a daily basis, is the difference in hourly labor costs between the Big Three and the U.S. plants of their Japanese competitors. “U.S. automakers, UAW focus to be on cutting $25 cost gap,” read an Associated Press headline on June 13. One month later the purported gap has widened. “Chrysler ... says it pays nearly $30 an hour more for labor than Japanese automakers do,” stated the July 21 New York Times.

The supposed cost gap compares only U.S. labor costs. U.S. automakers indeed pay more for retiree health care than Toyota and Honda pay at their nonunion U.S. plants. Yet if the cost of health care is the problem, why are the Big Three cutting jobs and closing plants in Canada, where there is a national health program?

In 2003, the bosses’ own figures pegged labor costs at $52 an hour. Now costs are said to be $70 to $75 an hour. Where did the increase go? Autoworkers aren’t seeing it in their paychecks—in fact, their cost-of-living allowance was cut for two consecutive quarters based on a supposed drop in the Consumer Price Index.

Inflation in the price of health benefits does not fully explain the alleged huge rise in labor costs.

The hourly dollar figures include health care for both active employees and retirees. Productivity has risen 50 percent in four years; cars that took 45 hours to build now take 30. There are fewer workers and they are working fewer hours. But health care costs are the same whether they work 40 hours per week, work lots of overtime, or are laid off. So, when they work fewer hours, the average hourly cost of health care is higher. Nevertheless, even trusting the companies’ own figures, productivity has brought actual labor costs per vehicle down.

Yet, like a broken record, the automakers present the need for cuts as an incontrovertible fact.

The slanted news coverage, on a nonstop basis, fosters a feeling of resignation among the hundreds of thousands of UAW members whose futures hinge upon the outcome of these negotiations. At the same time, in a classic example of divide and conquer, the vast majority of unorganized workers are fed an image of overpaid and lazy UAW members.

Behind the propaganda and distorted figures is the built-in drive of capital, fueled by the expansion of private equity into the auto industry, to force down the price of labor power. While the Asian competitors may in fact have a cost advantage, that is not what is driving the restructuring. If the competition from Asia could be eliminated, cutthroat competition between the Big Three would become exacerbated, and the bosses would still be telling the workers that pay and benefit cuts were necessary to remain “competitive.”

In fact, when compensation is reduced for workers in the unionized sector, that exerts a downward pressure on the wages and benefits of workers in the unorganized sector. What would stop Toyota, Honda and Nissan from compelling their nonunion workforce to take a pay cut?

What the ruling class—not only in the U.S. but in Europe and Asia as well—has in mind is to complete the restructuring begun with the technological changes of the 1980s. They want to reduce the workforce to the absolute bare minimum number needed to maintain production. They want to eliminate work rules that protect jobs. Through automation technology they want to maximize exploitation.

When workers are torn away from the productive process and replaced by machinery, the process requires huge infusions of cash. That is the force behind the drive to reduce wages and at the same time sell off huge segments of the industry to vulture capitalists.

On the first day of negotiations Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda immediately proclaimed that “We can no longer afford to conduct business as usual.” He reportedly aggressively told UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President General Holiefield that “We want a settlement.” (New York Times, July 21)

Gettelfinger has delivered a mixed message. On the one hand he has made statements opposing drastic concessions. On the other hand, in settlements with auto parts makers Dana and Delphi, he has agreed to major cuts in wages and benefits as well as plant closings.

Whatever goes on behind closed doors, it is time for every concerned UAW member, every rank and file activist, every sincere steward and local official to make his or her voice heard.

We must say that enough is enough. We must say that we are fed up with givebacks to profit-hungry bosses who won’t give an inch when it comes to their salaries and bonuses. We must say that we are willing to fight to hold the line on wages, pensions, health care and our property right to our jobs. We must say that we refuse to be shark bait in the dangerous waters of private equity.

We can distribute educational leaflets. We can speak and pass resolutions at our union meetings. We can go to the company “Town Hall” meetings and challenge the bosses on their turf. We can sign petitions. We can follow the example of Soldiers of Solidarity and engage in “work to rule.” We can find a hundred and one ways to challenge the line that concessions are unavoidable.

What if we could come together in an emergency conference, with autoworkers from all over the world, to develop a perspective for struggle? We would be organized so that, when the time comes, if need be we can call on our sisters and brothers to vote with one voice, with a resounding “no” to capitalist restructuring on the backs of workers.

We can draw inspiration from the UAW retirees, who have a rich history of struggle. As the GM-UAW negotiations began in Dearborn, Mich., three busloads of retirees from Flint arrived at 8:00 a.m. to picket and oppose concessions on pensions and retiree health care.

Martha Grevatt has been a Chrysler worker and UAW activist for 20 years.

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