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Layoffs loom despite major givebacks

NOV. 14 UPDATE—The UAW announced on Nov. 14 that its members had ratified the contract with Ford. There was less opposition to the concessions than at General Motors or Chrysler; still more than one in five voted no.

Last month, General Motors and Chrysler UAW members ratified four-year contracts with the biggest and smallest of the Big Three auto companies. Now 54,000 Ford workers are voting on a similar deal.

The official spin from Ford and the UAW leadership is that the contract protects jobs, with only 10 plant closings instead of the 16 Ford had announced earlier this year. The tradeoff? As with GM and Chrysler, Ford can start new hires at roughly half the pay of current production workers.

However, while GM and Chrysler are limited to paying the lower rate to workers in certain “non-core” classifications, Ford has no such restrictions. And Ford got an even bigger break than the other two companies in what it will contribute to the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association fund for retiree health care, putting the Ford retirees’ benefits in even greater danger.

With vote tallies in from a majority of Ford’s plants, ratification appears likely, but support is not unanimous. “I’m voting no. I just don’t believe in the two-tier wage. That’s selling out of union principles,” insisted Junior Chrislip, a worker in Dearborn, Mich. “The job guarantees? Ask the Chrysler and GM workers what they think of job guarantees in their contract. At least in my work area, a lot of people are talking about voting no.”

At the Cleveland casting plant, scheduled to close in 2010, and two adjacent engine plants, an ad hoc Committee To Preserve Our Contracts called on workers to “Vote no on this pension-wage rip-off.”

The term “rip-off” is no exaggeration. According to GM’s own figures, and assuming a similar pattern at Ford and Chrysler, the three companies will see their labor costs cut in half by 2011. Claiming that wage and benefits cost them $75 an hour, the automakers stand to pocket $37 per hour of labor as a result of these concessionary contracts.

With 172,000 UAW members currently employed at the Big Three, this constitutes a $6.5 million dollar per hour rip-off of workers’ labor.

Yet gratitude, clearly, is not in these thieves’ vocabulary. At all three companies the bosses are already displaying contempt for any contractual understanding about jobs there may have been. The workers are still voting and already Ford CEO Alan Mulally, after announcing that the misnamed “Way Forward” target of 44,000 job cuts had been met, said, “We will continue to reduce our employment consistent with our restructuring to operate at the lower demand over the next few years.” (Detroit Free Press, Nov. 9)

Mass layoffs at GM and Chrysler began just days after the contracts were ratified—in plants that were supposedly “saved” from being shuttered by a moratorium on plant closings. Whole shifts are being shut down at six Chrysler plants in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. In Marion, Ill., a GM plant with 1,300 workers now could lose 830 jobs.

Already GM has backed off from a commitment to make current temporary employees permanent. By the end of January 500 temp workers in Lansing, Michigan will be laid off indefinitely, along with 510 “traditional” workers. The UAW leadership has given GM the OK.

All of these cost-cutting measures are driven by capital’s insatiable drive for profit. Detroit’s automakers are willingly ceding domestic market share to their overseas competitors. Meanwhile they are expanding their global reach into the lucrative Asian market, where Ford and GM are breaking sales record on their rivals’ home turf.

However, to realize the full profit potential of this growing economy they need to export not only products, but whole factories with the most advanced, most exploitive technology. Hence while the axe was falling in Michigan, GM announced it was building a plant in India.

Ford is has just opened a manufacturing center in China and is building a plant in Thailand, primarily to reach car buyers in Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

“Ford’s strategy appears to be to save money by radically slashing operations in North America while making money by expanding in the growth markets in Asia and elsewhere outside the United States,” reported the International Herald Tribune. “Ford’s operations outside the United States give the company a lifeline of liquidity, including $551 million of pre-tax profit in South America in 2006, $469 million in Europe and $168 million through its association with Mazda.” (Oct. 9)

Desperate not to be left behind, Chrysler has adopted the slogan “go global” as part of its so-called “Recovery and Transformation Plan”—the slashing of one in three workers’ jobs in North America.

For the labor movement, there is a real danger of drawing national chauvinistic and protectionist conclusions from these developments that divert the struggle away from the companies. On the other hand, the globalizing of exploitation creates the potential for a worldwide, class-wide movement against both the sharpened exploitation in the imperialist countries and the super-exploitation of the most oppressed. Armed with this cross-country solidarity, workers will make it harder for bosses anywhere to beat them down.

A Job is a Right!

The corporate agenda is already provoking class conflict at the plant level, where local contract issues remain unresolved. This week UAW Local 1005 at GM’s Parma, Ohio, stamping plant, announced the possibility of a strike over job consolidations. “We don’t want to go on strike, but there are issues at the local level,” President Tito Boneta stated. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 12)

Regardless of contract language, workers have every right to resist any threat to take away their livelihoods, which are their legal and human rights. These jobs are the property of the workers and the communities whose economies depend on them. As workers, these jobs should be there for future generations—with union wages and pension protections.

The worldwide class struggle must be resuscitated around the slogan “a job is a right”—and the sooner the better.