UAW seeks ‘partnership’ with bosses

The United Auto Workers wrapped up its three-day “Special Bargaining Convention” in Detroit on March 24 with a spirited march in solidarity with public workers and against Wall Street. Operations at Bank of America were even shut down for half an hour by a contingent of demonstrators, led by UAW President Bob King, who went inside the bank. (See related photo story.) The UAW is a key player in the Detroit-based People Before Banks coalition.

The thrust of the convention, however, was not to energize the delegates with a militant, confrontational strategy against capital. Instead, the convention’s omnibus resolution made over 20 separate references to “partnership” or “teamwork” or “working with employers.” There were nearly as many appeals to “the middle class” where there should have been language pushing working-class solidarity.

With the crisis facing the UAW now — as a result of decades of capitalist restructuring — it boggles the mind to think that the once-mighty union would seek a partnership with the bosses who created the crisis. In 1979 the union had 1.5 million members compared to 350,000 today. Half a million once worked for General Motors. Now UAW members number 49,000 at GM and their numbers are even lower at Ford and Chrysler.

In 2007 job security promises were the carrot used to extract humiliating concessions from UAW members at the Detroit Three. In 2009 when the bosses wanted still more, they used the club of fear over a threatened Chapter Seven liquidation. The end result was a contract, imposed on a shrunken workforce, that took away many of the gains won though long strikes from the 1940s through the 1960s.

A divisive two-tier pay scale has the union’s newest members working for half the pay of their higher seniority counterparts doing the same work. Many have been hired as temporary and/or part-time — known internationally as “precarious” — workers. In the past year not a single hourly worker hired by Ford has been made permanent.

‘No solidarity with two-tier!’

Some convention delegates challenged the official line. As part of a campaign initiated by the Autoworkers Caravan to overturn two-tier pay scales, they strode to the microphones in T-shirts reading “Do the math: = pay 4 = work = solidarity.” Scott Houldieson, representing UAW Local 551 in Chicago, called for a firm commitment to make all workers classified as temporary become permanent employees.

Al Benchich of Local 909 in Detroit argued against the statement: “We are moving on a path that no longer presumes an adversarial work environment.” He pointed out, “Whether you work in the public sector or the private sector, everything they are doing to us is adversarial.”

Despite the flawed strategy of labor-corporate cooperation, the convention resolution might appear to be full of ambitious and laudatory goals. It is full of language addressing the need to end precarious work, provide “retirement security,” win job protections and “justice for new hires,” and “look to the future.” But this is only a half-hearted call to partially restore what UAW members took for granted until their own leaders urged them to relinquish their hard-fought gains.

The UAW, like most unions, has taken quite a beating in recent years. It has been seriously weakened, and now the leadership has no answers other than to continue down the same disastrous path that got them into the rotten situation to begin with.

The perceived need to accommodate the capitalist ruling class in order to stave off another vicious assault partly explains the orientation away from class struggle — and toward “converting” their class opponents. But employing the same failed strategy again will not yield different results. Nice words about “advancing our social vision” are no match for an aggressive capitalist strategy that seeks to drive down the cost of labor power for all workers in order to maximize profits.

Many autoworkers are inspired by the current working-class upsurge and solidarity seen in Wisconsin and beginning elsewhere around the country. They would respond well to a call to strike back against the real partnership — the company bosses, the government and the banks that together exploited the bankruptcy process to try to destroy the UAW.

They would have been happy if, on the way to the bank, the march stopped to protest outside the single biggest destroyer of manufacturing jobs since the recession began. That would be none other than General Motors.

Martha Grevatt is a 23-year UAW Chrysler worker. Email: [email protected]