Report from auto worker on GM layoffs

The news spread like wildfire throughout the cavernous Doraville, Ga., GM assembly plant on the Monday before the November holidays: “We’re on the hit list. They’re going to shut us down.”

Dianne Mathiowetz

From line to line, on the first shift, then the second, workers kept completing their jobs, assembling more than 1,000 minivans a day, even though their world had just been turned upside down.

On Nov. 21, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner followed up on his announcement in early summer that the world’s largest automaker planned on cutting thousands of jobs by 2008.

At a press conference, Wagoner released the names of 12 plants to be shut down. The number of workers involved had grown to 30,000.

From Oklahoma to Michigan to Ten nessee, workers and their families are struggling with an avalanche of emotions —anger, anxiety, sadness, disgust, resignation and determination to resist.

A dozen communities are facing economic losses that will impact local schools and social services. The Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank, estimates that 9.4 jobs elsewhere in the economy depend on one auto job. Everything from parts suppliers to nearby restaurants and gas stations are hurt when an auto plant shuts down.

Some facilities are scheduled to close within months in early 2006; others such as the Doraville plant will finish out their product’s run in 2008.

Valuable real estate

As one of GM’s oldest production facilities, Doraville has often been mentioned when possible plant closings are raised. It sits on 157 very valuable acres of land just inside the perimeter interstate that encircles Atlanta. Developers of shopping malls and high-priced condominiums have been lining up to buy the property. GM stands to pocket millions of dollars on the sale.

But for the more than 3,000 men and women who build automobiles every day at Doraville, some for most of their adult lives, the loss of their jobs is about more than just a paycheck.

In some cases, today’s worker is a third-generation auto maker. Their grandfathers were among the first to work at Doraville and helped establish UAW Local 10. There are many extended families with brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles who all have raised their families on the wages and benefits won in decades of struggle.

Long-time workers name with pride the different car models they have built and the awards the plant has received for efficiency and quality.

Said one, “It’s like they’ve dropped a bomb on us. It doesn’t make a difference all that we’ve done for GM.”

Doraville’s workforce includes many hundreds of people who transferred from other parts of the country when GM closed their plants in the past. They already have experienced the trauma of leaving behind all that is familiar and re-establishing their lives in a new place.

GM claims that the devastating plant closures are necessary to bring the corporation back into profitability. It desires to have 100 percent use of its facilities. In other words, the current plants are capable of producing more vehicles but GM can’t sell that number at a high profit.

The cruel reality of capitalism is that the workers are not responsible for any of the decisions management made in design, development or marketing. They did not authorize the multi-million dollar bonuses paid out yearly to the corporate bigwigs; they do not control GM’s political clout when it comes to government policies on fuel efficiency standards or national health care. But they are the ones who suffer most intensely from this profit-based system.

From a peak employment of almost 500,000 in the late 1970s, there are now only about 110,000 GM autoworkers in the United States. Through automation and high-tech equipment, outsourcing and the widespread use of ready-to-install parts, these fewer workers produce roughly the same number of vehicles.

A study by the U.S. Census Bureau, which annually surveys manufacturing, figures that each autoworker produces $463,000 worth of value. Even taking into account the cost of wages and benefits, overtime pay and pensions, it is clear that each worker provides the corporation with a huge surplus. Yet GM is driven to increase that surplus per worker as it competes with other auto companies for market dominance and investors.

GM has launched an unprecedented assault on its workers and their union. Besides announcing plant closings on Nov. 21, the company had just wrenched more than $1 billion from health insurance benefits by demanding a re-negotiated contract. Its possible bankruptcy raises the threat that GM will totally abrogate its union contracts, which in turn threatens pensions for its hundreds of thousands of retirees. The UAW national leadership is scrambling to keep up with GM’s multi-pronged attack.

Right now, workers at Doraville have perhaps two years to figure out their personal plans for the future. Some are eligible for retirement, although even that option is full of uncertainty. Those with considerable seniority hope to get a transfer to another plant. Younger workers will most likely have to find a job somewhere else for less pay and benefits.

The rank-and-file workers at Doraville and all the other assembly plants, foundries and stamping plants know that the UAW was founded by bold and decisive action, including plant sit-ins in Flint, Mich., 70 years ago.

All workers, whether in other unions or unorganized, will be impacted by GM’s effort to roll back the clock on wages and benefits.

The labor movement along with its allies in the community need to develop a strategy to stop this aggressive, preemptive war of corporate America.

The workers at Doraville GM want to know what to do.

Mathiowetz is a near-30-year veteran GM worker, first at the now-closed Lakewood Assembly plant, then at Delphi in Lockport, N.Y., and now at Doraville in the trim department.