From a former Chrysler Lynch Road assembly workers

On Sept. 28 Rep. Barney Frank defended the Wall Street bailout package on C-SPAN by saying that the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, a bailout of $1.2 billion, gave the federal government “a little money.” Frank is leading the charge to have the capitalist government now give Wall Street a whopping $700 billion, saying that just like with Chrysler, the federal government may make money in the end.

That money will come from the workers.

But what are the real lessons of the Chrysler loan guarantees for the workers and the oppressed communities, such as in Detroit? In 1977, Chrysler employed 145,953 workers, 26.5 percent of whom were African American. In the Detroit metro area, 83,656 Chrysler workers were employed: 57.5 percent of the total.

By the end of 1982, after the loan guarantees were in place for three years, Chrysler employed just 63,574 workers, with just 21.1 percent of the total African Americans. And there were just 33,051 workers employed in and around Detroit, 52 percent of the total. Detroit remains devastated to this day.

When Chrysler closed its Lynch Road assembly plant in 1980, it gave a three-hour notice to the workers over the radio stations. Plant guards and Detroit police were stationed around the plant gates to ensure that the workers didn’t “break into” the plant to start work.

On top of that, remaining Chrysler union workers were forced to undergo severe wage concessions because of the act. Ford and General Motors were enabled to lay off thousands of their workers and squeeze concessions from the UAW right up to today.

It is clear that today’s Wall Street bailout amounts to the same Chrysler model, with a vast increase in scale. There are no promises of a moratorium on home foreclosures. There are no guarantees of jobs. It amounts to champagne for the financial wizards of Wall Street and cutbacks and austerity for the workers and oppressed.

In his pamphlet, “Chrysler and the UAW,” Workers World Chairperson Sam Marcy wrote: “Under workers’ control of production for use instead of profit, it [the auto industry] could thrive and develop and at the same time renovate itself in an orderly fashion without invoking any cataclysmic collapse (as though the earth were collapsing from under the industrial plants and equipment of the auto industry).”

As those words applied to the auto industry almost 30 years ago, they ring true today for the whole country. The only way to end this financial tumult that Wall Street has enmeshed us in is for the workers and oppressed communities to control production for “use instead of profit!”

—Chris Fry
Delmar, NY

Fry was a labor activist in Detroit during the period of the 1979 Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act.