Auto workers need a socialist strategy

[dcsmart]

Defend pensions, jobs, and wages! No concessions!
Auto workers need a socialist strategy
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada)
23 April 2009

Thousands of auto workers—retired, laid-off, and working—will rally with working people from all sections of the economy at the Ontario Legislature today to protest the provincial Liberal government’s reneging on a three decade-old guarantee to partially protect the pensions of retired workers should their former employer go bankrupt.


While Premier Dalton McGuinty claims that his government has no money to honour the Pension Guarantee Fund’s obligations, his Liberals slashed corporate taxes to record lows in last month’s provincial budget.


McGuinty’s pension announcement is part of an intensifying drive on the part of the big business elite that rules North America to make the working class pay for the crisis of world capitalism. Workers and pensioners at Nortel, Stelco, AbitibiBowater and countless smaller companies now face an uncertain future.


But McGuinty’s announcement was first and foremost directed against General Motors and Chrysler workers. That is, it was aimed at reinforcing the corporate-government campaign on both sides of the Canada-US border to use the crisis in the auto industry and the threat of bankruptcy looming over the Detroit Three to gut auto workers’ rights and living standards.
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1. Militant industrial action based upon the independent interests of the working class.

2. A break with the politics of class collaboration.

3. Rejection of the capitalist market and revival of an international socialist movement of the working class.

In every country workers face a similar future: rising unemployment, declining wages, economic depression. Workers should reject all forms of nationalism promoted by the trade unions. The crisis of capitalism is a global crisis and the response of the working class to this crisis must be a global response.
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i think it is also important to understand the Marxist definition of working class:

"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."
from the Communist Manifesto

We see from that defintion that the majority are working class.