Ford bosses to cut 30,000 jobs

The Ford Motor Co. launched its long-threatened assault on the workers on Jan. 22 with the announcement of plans to lay off 25,000 to 30,000 auto workers and shutter 14 plants. It also intends to lay off 4,000 white-collar staff.

Seven assembly and parts plants are to be closed by 2008 and the rest by 2012. The company aims to reduce its workforce in North America by 28 percent to stop losses on its operations in the U.S. and Canada. Ford’s layoff announcements come in the wake of a similar announcement by General Motors in December of 30,000 layoffs and the shutdown of nine plants.

Scheduled for the ax are Ford assembly plants in Hazelwood, Mo., outside St. Louis; Wixom, Mich., outside Detroit; and Hapeville, Ga., outside Atlanta. It also will close the transmission plant in Batavia, Ohio, outside Cincinnati; shut down Windsor Casting in Ontario and shut down a shift at St. Thomas, also in Ontario. It has also been rumored that plants in St. Paul, Minn., and Cuautitlan, Mexico, are on the chopping block.

The plants named cover less than 10,000 of the intended 30,000 layoffs, leaving workers all over the continent worrying over whether they will have a job by 2008. This cruel tactic may partly be a result of the fact that Ford is rushing to appease Wall Street investors by announcing a restructuring before it has been figured out. But, more importantly, it is also calculated to sow fear and competition among workers—to set plant against plant, each hoping theirs will be spared. And it is meant to minimize the prospects of a company-wide rebellion.

Billionaire Ford calls for ‘sacrifice’

William Clay Ford, grandson of the company’s infamous founder, Henry Ford, had the audacity to tell the workers that “Today, we declare the resurgence of the Ford Motor Company.… We call our plan The Way Forward … it’s a strategy that calls for sacrifice at all levels of the company.” Ford is not making much of a sacrifice. In addition to his inherited billions, he “earned” $22 million last year in salary and cashed-in stock options. He made $5 million the year before and left $15 million in options unexercised.

The company is pleading that it has to turn its profit picture around. But the fact is that Ford made $3.5 billion in profit in 2004 and $2 billion in 2005. The company has $25 billion in cash on hand. In fact, Ford’s profits jumped in the fourth quarter of 2005, pushing its stock price up. Despite reporting losses in North America, it has enough money to keep the workers on indefinitely and still make a profit on world-wide operations in the present global market.

Ford employs 324,000 workers worldwide, 122,000 of them in North America. Of these, 88,000 are in the U.S. at 18 assembly plants, eight stamping plants and 17 powertrain and casting plants. Its market share of the more than 16 million units sold in the U.S. annually has dropped from 26 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005. It has been operating below 80 percent capacity in North America. The layoffs are supposed to help turn this situation around.

Most of Ford’s dramatic decline in sales were due to a drop in demand for gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks as gas prices rose. Both Ford and GM had largely abandoned the fierce competition with Japanese, German and Korean auto monopolies for the passenger car market in the 1990s. Out of arrogance and short-sighted greed, both of these giants chased after the high-profit SUV and truck market. Now, outmaneuvered by their corporate rivals from Europe and Asia, they are trying to make the workers pay the price.

Ford is supposed to accompany the layoffs with an aggressive new design and marketing campaign to rebuild its passenger car business and stabilize its market share. But the workers and the union should not have to depend upon the ups and downs of the capitalist market for job security.

Whether the bosses are making super-profits or not, the workers have put their sweat and blood on the line. They have built the company and all its wealth. They have a fundamental right to their jobs, independent of the business climate. Workers should not be interested in being set up to compete with other workers over market share in a rat race to the bottom.

Instead of looking at the company’s books so that the filthy rich auto bosses can prove “hardship,” the United Auto Workers union should declare that a job is a right. In response to an official UAW statement on the layoffs, UAW member Ron Lare of the Rouge plant told the Detroit Free Press: “When Rosa Parks got thrown off the bus, she didn’t just say it was unfortunate. She went out in the streets and started a movement. The UAW should start a movement to outlaw plant closings.”

Violates moratorium
on plant closings

This plant-closing announcement is both a slap in the face and an open challenge to the UAW. The contract it signed with Ford in 2003 declares a moratorium on plant closings. The company is in violation of the contract by unilaterally announcing plant closings and tearing up the moratorium in advance of the 2007 negotiations.

Ford announced that the closings would begin in 2008, after the upcoming negotiations. This was a thinly disguised attempt to legally circumvent the contract. But the company is confronting the workers with a fait accompli by “moth-balling” the plants and reducing operations while not officially shutting them down.

UAW President Ron Gettlefinger reportedly “blasted Ford’s plan as ‘extremely disappointing and devastating news.’ Moreover, Gettlefinger said a showdown over the wholesale elimination of jobs and factories is coming at the Big Three national contract talks in 2007. ‘Certainly today’s announcement will make the negotiations in 2007 all the more difficult and all the more important.’” (Detroit Free Press, Jan. 23)

The official statement by Gettlefinger and UAW Vice President Gerald Bantom, who directs the national Ford department, is rather mild. However, it ends with an assertion that, whether meant seriously or not, must be taken with dead seriousness and enforced by the rank-and-file.

“The UAW-represented workers affected by today’s action are covered by the job security program and all other provisions and protections of the UAW-Ford National Agreement. Our union will rigorously enforce those programs,” read the statement.

Ford workers, GM workers and the entire membership of the union must see to it that not only their job security but also the health and pension provisions in the contract are enforced to the letter. Every day in the capitalist media there is a steady drumbeat of attacks on income security for laid-off workers—the so-called jobs banks—in the UAW contract. Under the Guaranteed Employment Numbers (GEN) provision, workers who are victims of plant closings are entitled to long-term pay.

Also under attack are so-called “legacy” costs such as workers’ pensions and retirees’ health care coverage.

There are endless complaints from the financial analysts, who find the Ford cutbacks “tepid” and a “first step.” They complain about the so-called “extra costs” per car that make Ford and GM “non-competitive” with European and Asian auto companies. These companies have moved into the South and other rural areas with anti-labor environments and set up non-union plants all over the country.

Wall Street and Ford would like to use the plight of non-union workers to overturn the hard-won gains of generations of unionized auto workers. Auto workers pion eered the struggle to establish industrial unions through sit-down strikes and on picket lines. They have sacrificed to get a small measure of income and health-care security.

Auto workers have given their lives at difficult labor so that the top executives and rich shareholders who never came anywhere near a production line could live in luxury.

In 2002, the UAW allowed William Ford to get away with closing five plants and laying off 35,000 workers under his “Back to Basics” restructuring plan. Last December, Ford got $850 million in givebacks from health-care benefits for retirees. All these concessions, instead of appeasing this billionaire company, have now led to the demand for more layoffs and will undoubtedly lead to demands for more concessions.

Work to rule:
in-plant resistance strategy

The lesson is that no concessions will lead to an end of the attacks. The only answer is organized resistance.

The rapacious greed of the Delphi auto parts manufacturer, which went to bankruptcy court to reduce wages by 60 percent and attack pensions and health care, has provoked new currents of rank-and-file organization. The recently organized Soldiers of Solidarity (SOS) demonstrated against Delphi at the National Auto Show in January. The UAW international leadership, to its shame, boycotted this very important opportunity to put a national spotlight on Delphi’s alliance with the courts and the banks to tear up the UAW contract.

UAW’s concessionary leadership fears SOS for more than just its demonstrations. SOS has been promoting the tactic of “work to rule.” This tactic is calculated to take advantage of the company’s vulnerability and allows the workers to resist from inside the plant. It was used by Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York City as pressure against the Metropolitan Transit Authority when the union was preparing for a possible transit strike.

The SOS website, www.soldiersofsolidarity.com, has a lengthy and valuable history and explanation of the tactic.

“The slogan ‘work to rule’ has a double meaning,” it says. “Work to rule is a method of slowing production by following every rule to the letter. The aim is to leverage negotiation. Work to rule is also an invocation for workers to govern collectively, to control the conditions of their labor. Work to rule means power to the people.

“Work to rule is an in-plant strategy, a method of influencing negotiations without going on strike. Workers follow the boss’s orders but do nothing on their own initiative. They keep their knowledge and experience to themselves, defer all decisions to the straw boss, and let the pieces fall where they may.”

SOS discusses work to rule in the context of the sitdown strikes of the 1930s. It also discusses how African-American slaves used their music to coordinate the pace of labor. These historical analogies help illuminate the tactic.

“Management thinks they control the plant with their clipboards, portable phones …. But when workers work to rule the bosses find out who really runs the plant, who keeps machines humming, production flowing and the money coming in.”

This tactic, which is being reborn out of the Delphi struggle, can be creatively applied and will hopefully spread industry-wide under this new barrage of attacks being laid down by GM and Ford. But whatever tactics are used, it is clear that there is a basis for rank-and-file resistance to these new assaults and everything must be done to organize and fan the flames of that resistance.

Stop the layoffs! A job is a right! Work to rule!