Autoworkers see tough fight ahead

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 04:38:00 +0000

News Analysis

United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger says the union is not entering the upcoming contract talks with Detroit automakers with givebacks in mind. “We’re not going into negotiations in a concessionary mode, I’ll tell you that,” Gettelfinger said July 11 after speaking at the NAACP national convention in Detroit.

The Big Three automakers (GM, Ford and Chrysler), not waiting for official talks to begin on July 20, have already started to negotiate in the press. They claim they have to trim their labor costs by 30 percent because of competition from the Japanese, primarily Toyota.

Wall Street analysts say “the Street” wants to see a landmark deal to offload $70 billion in retiree health care liabilities to the union. Second, they want a two-tier wage structure that will pay new hires a fraction of what current workers make and offer them fewer benefits. Third, they want to eliminate the union-backed “job bank,” which they see as a “pay for no work” scheme.

Wall Street kingpins are so excited about their wish list that they are operating as if the workers and their union will have little or nothing to say about it. They hope that concessions made by the UAW in their recent contract with Delphi, the auto parts maker, will carry over to the Big Three.

Wall Street trading results show the effect. Shares in former Delphi parent GM are up 23 percent since June 1 to $37.54, and Fitch Ratings this week removed GM from its “negative watch.” Ford shares surged more than 15 percent to $9.64 by July 2.

Many people question industry statements about how much in distress the Big Three find themselves.

Only July 16, Ford announced plans to spend $1.37 billion developing a former Daewoo car factory in Romania into a major facility for its vehicle and engine production requirements.

A week earlier, Ford announced that it will spend $100 million to expand capacity at its factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, where it plans to increase production from 72,000 to 125,000 vehicles by 2009.

Doing well on Wall Street, GM seems to be on a mission to grab money wherever and however it can. The European Commission has launched an investigation into $17 million in aid given to Vauxhall, a GM subsidiary, by the British government. The money was supposed to be used by GM to train workers to keep a plant near Liverpool viable.

However, GM had apparently already begun the training and was in no need of a financial incentive to do so. Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s competition commissioner, said “public funds are not supposed to provide windfall profits to companies.”

U.S. automakers, of course, have a history of doing almost anything and everything to make profits. Observers note that the bankrupt Delphi auto parts manufacturer was a spin-off from GM, which dumped a less profitable part of its business to wring concessions from its workers. GM is now using the concessions won at Delphi to pressure for similar takebacks in the rest of the industry.

Chrysler put a two-tier wage system into effect in its assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill., where equal work for unequal pay is now the rule. Workers who make $18 an hour work alongside others who make $40 an hour, plus benefits. The company argued that the two-tier wage system at Belvidere makes the plant viable and that the unique arrangement between Chrysler and the United Auto Workers paved the way for a third shift.

But the system has caused demoralization and arguments on the plant floor, and has generated a federal lawsuit by the “enhanced temporary workers,” as the lower-tier workers are called. The Belvidere situation gives a good picture of what life will be like for U.S. autoworkers if the companies have their way in the upcoming negotiations.

Although Belvidere is the only auto assembly plant where this has happened, two-tier systems are already in place at several parts suppliers, including Delphi.

The UAW and autoworkers say the companies, worth many billions, cannot expect the workers to make more sacrifices.

Because autoworker pay and benefits help set the standard for all workers, the labor movement sees this battle as crucial. A resolution recently adopted by a United Steelworkers sub-district in the Chicago area reads in part, “‘If only we had stopped them at PATCO’ is a cry heard too often,” referring to President Reagan’s attack on the air traffic controllers in 1981. “Let’s not have to say, ‘If only we had stopped the attack on the autoworkers in 2007.’ We support the UAW and the autoworkers. Their fight is our fight.”

jwojcik @pww.org

What happened to immigration reform?

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 06:00:00 +0000

Commentary

The Senate last month failed to pass the Bush-backed immigration reform plan, known as the “grand bargain.” It’s now widely reported that any immigration reform measures will have to wait until after the 2008 elections.

The “grand bargain” bill was fatally flawed from the get-go. The president, the Republican right and their big business backers are the main culprits preventing any comprehensive approach. If nothing is achieved on immigration reform, it will be mainly due to their greed and reactionary politics.

Bush insisted on not only a guest worker program, but the worst guest worker program that a twisted mind could invent. It would have immigrant families bouncing back and forth between their countries of origin and the United States, with no rights to do anything but work themselves half to death for unscrupulous U.S. employers, and then be sent back “home” to starve in their old age.

Bush and his ilk were not even willing to allow guest workers, after a time in the program, to get points toward permanent legal residency. A moderate amount of exploitation would not do; they had to have a program that would drain the last drop of blood from the guest worker.

The result of this was that the AFL-CIO and many other labor and community organizations came out against the bill, and others were less than enthusiastic in supporting it.

As the Republican far-right was working full blast against any kind of immigration reform, and progressive forces were also against this bill or at best lukewarm about it, the thing was doomed.

Much of the Republican Party has decided that they are going to try in 2008 what did not work too well for them in 2006 — to use immigrant-bashing to distract the attention of the voters from the Iraq war and soaring corporate profits. So they have spent their time conjuring up a bogey of rampaging immigrants “destroying the fabric of this country.”

This pulled the whole debate on immigration sharply to the right. It changed it from a debate on “Immigrants: good or bad for the country?” to “Immigrants: How can we crush them before they eat our babies?” And every kind of misinformation was used from discredited sources such as the Center for Immigration Studies, without any challenge in the mainstream media.

The talking heads, or rather, the ranting, raving, frothing-at-the-mouth heads, on cable TV news and talk radio were allowed to poison the airwaves night after night with racist diatribes based on false information about immigrants as bringers of crime, disease and terrorism.

The media conglomerates let them do this without any concern for social responsibility, without the thought crossing their minds that this could actually lead to acts of violence against immigrants. These ranters sold the sponsors’ products, so it did not matter if they were morphing into neo-Nazis before our eyes and ears.

The Democrats can’t be let off the hook. In the first place, it seems clear that working out the “grand bargain” behind closed doors was a mistake. The Senate’s regular committee process should have been used, in which anti-immigrant arguments could have been discredited and pro-immigrant arguments gotten across.

With one side screaming that immigrants are murderous invaders, and the other (many Democrats) not really challenging this, no wonder a lot of people are confused.

And we can’t let ourselves in the immigrant rights movement off the hook either. The huge marches of last year should have been transformed into a massive movement of political pressure on Congress and the White House, and also of education of the public on the subject of immigration. Instead, the momentum was wasted in infighting among movement factions.

While the anti-immigrant lobby worked night and day to pressure members of Congress, the pro-immigration forces were strangely muted, as if they thought that the mass marches alone would convince Congress to do what they wanted.

This shows lack of political sophistication, because precisely what the politicians fear about masses marching in the street is that they might vote them out of office. Already, Republicans are seeing shifts among Latino voters because of GOP immigrant-bashing and anti-Latino racism.

We should not accept the idea that the struggle for immigrant rights has to wait until after the 2008 elections. We have to get back on the streets and in the legislatures, with demands for a moratorium on the raids and deportations, and for action in Congress to pass multifaceted progressive immigration reform that will respect the rights of immigrant and non-immigrant workers and their families.

People Before Profit blog

Autoworkers see tough fight ahead

What happened to immigration reform?