UAW Must Fight GM/Delphi!

WfJRNERS 'ANfJIJAR' 50¢ No. 857 28 October 2005 UAW Must Fight GM/Delphi! Delphi. the world's larg Auto production directly in est auto parts supplier. and volves coal. steel. rubber. General Motors. the world's rail and trucking. When largest automaker. have Chrysler-now part of the launched an unprecedented German company Daimler union-husting assault against Chrysler-threatened hank the United Auto Workers ruptcy in 1979, the response (UAW). Four years into a by the sellouts in the UAW's purported economic recov Solidarity House was to ery hased largely on mas accept a seat on Chrysler's sin: layoffs and deadly board of directors. From this speedup. U.S. workers are lofty height. UAW chief seeing the largest decline in Doug Fraser ~h()\ed conces real wages in decades. On sion contracts down work Octoher 8. GM spin-off er,' throats with the threat Delphi. which supplies GM that they hetter swallow lest with parts. went the corpo they lose their jobs. So they rate hankruptcy route already swallowed and lost their jobs. taken by most major airlines. e ea In the last 25 years. GM. Ford Delphi's \\orkel'S' are threat and Chrysler have shed some ened with destitution. as the 600.000johs in the U.S .. and company demands that their the UAW memher.,hip has pay be cut from £27.00 to dropped from 1.5 million to $10.00 per hour! Ie" than 700.000. On the heeb of Delphi's But it doesn't have to bankruptcy announcement. uto osses' happen this way. The rotten GM bosses demanded mas GM deal is going to the sive givebacks from the UAW. UAW membership for a vote • -vote it down' GM and The treacherous union tops immediately surrendered to Delphi \\orkers must fight GM's demands. in the name hack. whi Ie they have jobs. of protecting the mammoth In 1998. a walkout at the corporation's sacred "com usting! Flint Metal Center plant. nlon expanding to "tne T'1int"'1":ast petiti\·eness." Current work- Delphi facility. quickly re ers and retirees. who broke thei{ backs for GM with six- and seven tract inherent in defined-benefit pro retirees from suing the company for cut sulted in the shutdown of 27 of GM's 29 day workweeks. are seeing their health grams perhaps made some economic ting their benefits! GM. naturally. voiced North American assembly facilities due to lack of parts. "I either stand now and care benefits slashed to the tune of $1 bil sense." He continued. "People are living its support for this move. American strike or there may be no tomorrow," one lion annually. It was "the largest single longer these days. Of course. that is a socialist Daniel Deleon captured the worker said at the time. The strike cost-cutting initiative ever announced by good thing. But the question is. how can treachery of the U.S. labor officialdom backed the auto giant down and ended in the company:' and "paves the way for we afford if)" Miller's answer? Work more than a century ago, branding them a stand-off. GM failed to deliver a crip Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler Group to like slaves. then die. the "labor lieutenants of capital." pling blow to the union. much to the cha seek similar cost-savings plans with the And the UAW tops' response? let us left unchallenged. the effect of Delphi grin of Wall Street investors. GM then UAW" (Detroit Free Press. 18 October). dig our members' graves' On October and GM's assaults on the UAW will be contrived to spin off Delphi, and now The capital ists deny bankruptcy pro 18. UAW officials asked a federal court enormous. layoffs and plant closings they're back for a second try at gutting tection to their victims while wielding in Detroit to approve the deal with Gen are already being threatened. potentially the UAW. Instead of being picked off the bankruptcy ax to void labor contracts eral Motors in order to prevent individual affecting the bulk of the U.S. proletariat. one by one, the union must prepare its and "reorganize" industry at the cost of entire membership for a hard struggle hundreds of thousands of jobs. Earlier against Delphi. GM and all the auto this month. working people across the country stood in long lines desperate to compal1les. file for bankruptcy before the new law Black Rights and Union Rights limiting protection from creditors went into effect. Meanwhile. Northwest Air JAW In this capitalist society where black lines declared bankruptcy two months people constitute a specially oppressed into a strike by AMFA mechanics. who race-color caste. every assault on union walked off the job rather than accept fiI workers hits the black population dis a 26 percent pay cut. The refusal of proportionately harel. Twenty years ago. the leaders of the other airline unions to one out of every four black workers was shut down Northwest in solidarity with a union member. Today that ratio has AMFA isolated the mechanics. whose slipped to close to one in seven. This fact jobs are being taken by scabs. And now is directly linked to the massive deindus every Northwest union is under the gun. trializatiol1 of the U.S .. particularly the The venality of the capitalist rulers in big urban centers in the Midwest. There attacking retirees is as brazen as it is has also been a migration of jobs to the breathtaking. Dubbed capitalism's "Mr. low-wage. non-union South and other Fix-lt." Delphi CEO Robert Miller ran areas in the U.S. and ahroad. Yet the per workers at Bethlehem Steel through the centage of black people in unions and in hankruptcy wringer to slash their bene basic industry is still proportionately fits and those of retirees and to massively higher than that of whites. In fact. the reduce the workforce. Miller blithely auto industry has one of the most racially told the Wall Street Journal (17 Octo UAW members in Flint, Michigan walk off the job in June 1998, integrated workforces in the U.S. Thus her): "When you worked for one em strike that shut down bulk of GM's North American production. continucd on page 10 ployer till age 65 and then died at age 70. and when health care was unsophisti cated and inexpensive. the social con- 43 Not One Person, Not One Penny for the Imperialist Military! Marxism, Militarism and War ... 6 7 25274 81030 7 Letter economic embargo-to access modern masses in Latin America and beyond to technology and develop new economic the fight for socialist revolution. the On Cuba's sectors. In extremis. opposition to such Cuban bureaucracy has long fostered illu in-.estment would amount to a program sions in '"progressive"" bourgeois regimes. of nationalist economic autarky. guaran from Allende in Chile in the early 1970s Collectivized Economy teeing that the population remqins mired to Chavez in Venezuela today. Meanwhile in poverty. the regime"s bureaucratic monopoly on Our opposition to the Castro bureauc political power has undermined the con 7 October 2005 (24 June). for example. notes how "'Cuban racy fundamentally tlows from its nation sciousness of the Cuban working class officials have closed scores of foreign alist of "'socialism in while producing economic distortions Dear Comrades: businesses that were welcomed here a political program one country." The article rightly con and inefficiencies. Our perspective is The article '"Feds: Hands Off ILA'"" in decade ago to bailout the nation's falter cludes that a proletarian political revolu a centrally planned economy based on WV No. 854 (16 September) wrongly ing economy." It adds that "'about a half tion based on a perspective of interna workers democracy. That ~aid. it is impor states that the International Longshore dozen of the more than 350 foreign firms tional extension of the revolution is the tant to be accurate about developments in men's Association represents dock work once based in Cuba's duty-free zones are only ultimate means to defend and the Cuban economy today. ers in Montreal. This used to be the case. still operating."" From 2002 to 2004. the expand the gains of the Cuban Revolu Comradely. however several years ago Montreal dock number of joint ventures decreased from tion. Rather than fight to win thE working John Masters workers. along with those in Quehec City about 400 to about 300. while Cuba's and other smaller ports in Quebec. reor Foreign Investment and Economic Coop ganized as locals of the Syndicat Canadien eration Ministry projects that another 67 dc la Fonction PUblique. will be closed this year. Meanwhile the In the same issue. the article "Bush Bans go\'ernment has taken the dollar out of Cuban Medical Aid"" states that "since circulation. tightened controls o\'er state No on Anti-Union 1991-92,"" the Cuhan regime "has inCI'eas enterprises doing business with foreign ingly (1pened up the country to imperialist ers. and sought to reduce dependence on economic penetration."" This was indeed imperialist investment through enacting the case following the counterre\oluti(\n significant new trade deals with Vene Prop 75! ary destruction of the Smiet Union and zuela and China. through the 1990s. as the Castro hureauc All this has not put an end to imperial into the labor mmement. The capital racy sought to restart a devastated econ ist economic penetration. which is still ist state has no husiness telling tIlt' omy through foreign in\'estment from. and significant in the tourism. nickel and tele California unions what they should or should not do joint ventures with, European and Cana communications industries.

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