Auto workers take on GM
By Barry Sheppard
On June 5, the United Auto Workers (UAW) struck in a General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan. The factory stamps sheet metal into car and truck body parts used in GM assembly plants. Six days later, workers struck at a nearby plant that produces spark plugs and other parts used in the company's assembly plants. As of June 18, GM has been forced to shut down another 20 of its 28 assembly plants in the US, Canada and Mexico.
That strikes at two key parts plants could bring most GM factories down is a result of the company's concentration of parts production in fewer plants and its introduction of "just-on-time" parts deliveries so that the assembly plants have lean inventories. While these methods increase efficiency in normal times, they also make the company vulnerable to strikes at selected plants.
GM is losing tens of millions of dollars a day. The laid-off workers can collect unemployment benefits, reducing the impact on the union's strike fund.
The key issue in the strike is GM's attempts to "outsource" work done by UAW members to other plants, usually with no union and much worse wages and working conditions. Some work is "outsourced" to factories outside the country.
In the last two years, since the last contract signed by the union and GM, the UAW has struck in GM plants a number of times, around basically the same issues. These ended in stalemates. In 1996, strikes at two brake plants in Dayton, Ohio, ended in nearly 180,000 lay-offs and cost the company about $900 million after taxes.
A financial expert quoted in the New York Times said, "Ever since Dayton, we've seen a new General Motors, one that is willing to make the hard decision in order to gain the efficiencies many of its competitors have". Now GM is playing hard ball with the union.
The workers in Flint fear that their factories will be shut. GM says the body stamping plant there is inefficient and wants to gut union work rules and sack hundreds of workers. The company also wants to hire outside contractors to maintain the stamping equipment, instead of UAW workers.
Another GM plant in Flint, Buick City, is scheduled to shut down next year, wiping out 2800 jobs. GM has cut 43,000 jobs in the Flint area in the last 20 years.
It was in Flint in the 1930s that the UAW was born in the great sit-down strikes, where workers occupied the factories. Claudia Perkins, a union representative at the parts plant now on strike, said, "If they bust the Flinters, they'll bust the stronghold of the UAW. This is very important."
The UAW notes that GM is reneging on a promise to invest $300,000,000 in the stamping plant, raising workers' fears that the company will shut the plant down if it doesn't get its way.
It's clear that the issue in this battle is the company's attempts to drastically weaken the UAW. The only reason that outsourcing cuts GM's costs is that workers in the outsourcing companies are paid only one-third of UAW wages, if they are located in north America, and even less in Third World countries. They also work under harsher work rules and conditions.
GM will keep using a supplier only if the cost of the supplier's products (which includes the supplier's profits) is less than the cost of producing the same products in GM plants covered by the UAW. This keeps the pressure on the suppliers to relentlessly press their workers.
The irony of this battle is that the UAW's top leaders sold the contracts they negotiated with the "big three" US auto companies in 1996 to the UAW membership on the basis that the contracts would guarantee the preservation of 95% of current auto jobs. Even then, there were enough loopholes allowing lay offs to drive a big GM truck through. Now it's clear from GM's plans that the "guarantee" is null and void.
The union leaders' strategy has been to try to protect the jobs of the shrinking UAW membership. They have forgotten about the people the UAW used to care about: the young workers, the unemployed, the millions of low-paid, non-union workers. This strategy doesn't even protect the jobs of current UAW workers, however, as is clear from GM's drive against the union.
A real strategy to defend the UAW and its members would include removing GM's incentive to outsource by organising the suppliers under contracts that would protect them as well as UAW workers.
By championing the cause of the over-worked, under-paid workers, the UAW would win more public sympathy in its battle with GM — just as the United Parcel Service workers did in their 1997 strike, fighting for low-paid part-time workers.
Whatever the weaknesses of the UAW leaders' strategy, however, it is in the interests of all workers to support the UAW in this fight. If GM succeeds in further weakening that union, all working people, not only the minority organised into unions, will have been dealt a blow.