November 25, 2008
A Big Caravan to Washington?
The Auto Crisis: Management, Labor and the Struggle for the Future
By DAN LaBOTZ
The crisis in the auto industry is about many things: the possible collapse of GM, Detroit gas guzzlers, auto emission standards, the environment, and the need for mass transportation, among others. But as became clear this last week, at the center of it all is the struggle between management and the workers, that is, between capital and labor. The crisis in auto is fundamentally about driving down workers’ wages, taking away their benefits, and putting management firmly in control of the workplace.
Mitt Romney, candidate for president in the Republican primaries, in his op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” wrote that the Big Three’s “huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands must be eliminated.” How? By making “new labor agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors like BMW, Honda, Nissan and Toyota.” Second, says Romney, “retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.”
A few days later New York Times columnist Joe Nocera argued that bankruptcy would be too long and slow a process to save the industry. He suggested that President-Elect Barack Obama create an auto Czar, someone like former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, to negotiate a new deal in auto. What would that deal look like? “It needs to dramatically reduce its legacy benefits, perhaps even eliminating health care benefits for union retirees. It needs to close plants. It needs to pay its workers what Toyota workers are paid in the United States—and not a penny more.”
The U.S. government, as the highest political expression of capital’s power in this country, will come to the aid of the auto industry—meaning aiding the auto companies to break one of the last strongholds of the old industrial unionism. A U.S. government bailout of auto, given with strict conditions demanding concessions, will stiffen the backbone of the Big Three and put a club in their hand so that they can finally and once and for all get rid what remains of what was once a powerful union. To America’s rich and powerful to save the auto industry means to save its profitability. It has nothing to do with saving jobs, workers or their communities.
If the auto companies and the government negotiate a bailout that drives the UAW and its members back into the past, we will be going back with them. Everyone’s job, everyone’s wages, everyone’s health care and pension is at state in this. We need to begin to fight back and there isn’t a moment to lose.
Please read the complete article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/labotz11252008.html