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On Wednesday afternoon, President Joe Biden gave a Labor Day speech that presented a fairy tale version of the role of the trade unions. The brutal reality is playing out across more than 15 Dana auto parts plants as the UAW and USW attempt to force through concessions contracts that workers overwhelmingly voted down.
The UAW limited the action to only a handful of people, but there is enormous potential for Dana workers to unite with their brothers and sisters across the auto and auto parts industry to overturn decades of union-backed concessions.
Former UAW Presidents Dennis Williams and Gary Jones have reported to federal prison to begin serving slap-on-the-wrist sentences.
The cynical ploy only proves that an agreement has already been reached and that the only thing the UAW is talking to Deere executives about is how to ram it through the rank and file.
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On Wednesday afternoon, President Joe Biden gave a Labor Day speech that presented a fairy tale version of the role of the trade unions. The brutal reality is playing out across more than 15 Dana auto parts plants as the UAW and USW attempt to force through concessions contracts that workers overwhelmingly voted down.
The UAW limited the action to only a handful of people, but there is enormous potential for Dana workers to unite with their brothers and sisters across the auto and auto parts industry to overturn decades of union-backed concessions.
In a speech at the White House before union executives on Wednesday afternoon, President Biden pledged a series of measures to strengthen the corporatist alliance between the unions, the corporations and the state.
There are growing concerns among workers that the unions are conspiring secretly behind their backs to override the “no” vote and impose the same contract workers just rejected.
Sean, a US Army veteran in his mid-30s, spoke to the WSWS about the fall of Kabul.
“Biden’s visit in July was both a show of force against workers at the company and an effort to stir up competition against our working class brothers and sisters in other countries.”
Despite the continuing media blackout of the Volvo strike, the influence of the Volvo strike is making itself felt among other workers, who are beginning to draw important lessons from the strike.
The Mack-Volvo Rank and File Committee in Macungie, Pennsylvania has been formed as a body independent of the official trade union and calls on other workers to do the same in their industry.
The “no” vote means the fight is just beginning. We are in a two-front war: against Dana and its bought-and-paid-for unions. We cannot let down our guard. To prepare for the next stage of this fight, we must lay out a battle plan, study the forces arrayed against us and marshal all our forces and allies.
This open letter was written by the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee at the New River Valley Plant in Dublin, Virginia following the overwhelming defeat of a UAW contract last weekend.
Faureica auto parts workers in Columbus, Indiana, are angry about the cover-up of a serious outbreak of coronavirus at the Gladstone plant.
JNAP workers in the trim department staged a protest Friday during the day shift, halting production after a worker was sent home after testing positive for COVID-19.
The Sterling Heights Assembly Rank-and-File Safety Committee calls on autoworkers to oppose the impending imposition of a 12-hour 7-day (12/7) work rotation at the plant.
Autoworkers in Saline, like their brothers and sisters at Faurecia Gladstone in Indiana, join a national network of rank-and-file committees that is fighting for a complete shutdown of the auto industry with full compensation for workers.
Autoworkers are being deprived of the most basic information about the spread of infections in their workplaces.
The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter is assisting autoworkers in the building of a network of interconnected rank-and-file committees, connected with educators, amazon workers, and workers in other key sections of industry.
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A year after wildcat strikes involving 70,000 workers, the maquiladora workers in Matamoros are leading the fight against the dangers workers face from Covid-19.
Far from bringing a dawn of “union democracy” to Mexico, the AFL-CIO and the Biden administration are invoking the “labor reform” provisions of the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal in an attempt to suppress the growing influence of socialist internationalism via the World Socialist Web Site.
José Luis H., who worked in the plant’s car body area, was the last confirmed death, on December 19. The plant’s Human Resources manager, who had overseen the firing of workers for challenging the lack of protections against COVID-19, also died earlier this month.
After 26 years working for GM, Sergio Contreras was fired after he quarantined, challenging the efforts of the corporation to cover up COVID-19 outbreaks and continue production.
The coverup of COVID-19 cases by GM and hundreds of manufacturing companies across Mexico is not only sanctioned by the López Obrador government, it is part of an official policy of under-reporting cases.
Asked about how workers should respond across North America, a worker said: “Through a strike protest to demand no reopening until it’s safe and the virus has been eradicated.”
After the historic wildcat strikes earlier this year, the channeling of a resurgence of struggles behind the trade union bureaucracy poses immense dangers to the working class.
During the first weeks of 2019, tens of thousands of striking workers brought to a halt virtually all the maquiladora manufacturing plants in the industrial Mexican city of Matamoros, just across the US border with Brownsville, Texas.
In a remarkable display of class unity and power, workers defied threats of retribution and violence from companies, union thugs, police and the military, and shut down a significant section of the closely-interconnected supply chain in North America.
Key to organizing their struggles across different companies and sectors was the formation of rank-and-file strike committees. Daily reports by the World Socialist Web Site played an important role in guiding the struggle and winning broader support.
In 2012, a management-provoked incident at the Maruti Suzuki Manesar auto factory outside of Delhi, India, was used as the pretext for the mass prosecution and frame-up of autoworkers, with 13 sentenced to life.
The sentencing of former UAW President Dennis Williams is the latest episode in a years-long federal investigation of top UAW executives that led to the conviction of 15 individuals, including Williams as well as former UAW President Gary Jones and former UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell.
The struggle of autoworkers at General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler (FCA) in the United States in 2019 represented a major strategic experience of the working class, both in the US and internationally. Of particular importance was the 40-day strike by 48,000 workers at General Motors, which was isolated and betrayed by the United Auto Workers
The growing struggles among autoworkers are unfolding as a unified international process. Among the most powerful examples is the stand taken by the Mexican GM workers who organized their co-workers to defend the striking GM workers in America. In response, GM fired several workers at the plant in Silao. These workers have received powerful support from their brothers and sisters in the US and around the world.
With the assistance of the UAW, Iacocca closed or consolidated 20 plants and eliminated 57,000 jobs after 1979, including 12 plants and 30,000 jobs in Detroit alone. Over the course of 19 months, he imposed nearly half a billion dollars in wage cuts, or nearly $10,000 for each autoworker. In today’s dollars that would translate to $35,000 a year.
This article by WSWS US Labor Editor Jerry White is part of the Autoworker Newsletter’s campaign on the still-unexplained shooting death of a young autoworker in the UAW office at Ford’s Woodhaven Stamping Plant. Claims by the company and the union that Hennings was “on drugs” and “disgruntled” were discredited by the coroner’s toxicology report and by interviews with family members and co-workers on the WSWS.
Long known as “the strike heard around the world,” the Flint sit-down was led by socialists and left-wing militants who understood the irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the working class—whose collective labor produces society’s wealth—and the capitalist owners whose profits are based on the exploitation of labor. To prepare the coming battles of the working class it is necessary to assimilate the political lessons of history, including the great Flint sit-down strike 80 years ago.
Labor historian and WSWS writer Tom Mackaman punctures the myths surrounding the the former United Auto Workers president, and explains how the UAW’s transformation into a corporatist adjunct of big business and the state, and its role as an industrial police force deployed against the workers it nominally represents, is the outcome of his policies and career.
This article by WSWS writer Shannon Jones, written in the midst of the 2015 contract talks, examines the historical transformation of the United Auto Workers into a cheap labor contractor for the auto companies, and details its financial interest in exploiting the autoworkers it claims to represent.
Ford had not set out to redistribute wealth. His primary aim was to create a loyal and stable workforce so that he could make full use of the moving assembly line, introduced a year earlier, in 1913, at his Highland Park plant where the Model T was manufactured. But Ford’s $5 day, adjusted for inflation and divided into an eight-hour shift, was worth more than the wages for new hires implemented In the Obama administration’s so-called “rescue” of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009.
This article was written by Shannon Jones on the anniversary of the murder of Chin, a Chinese-American man, by an auto plant superintendent and his stepson at the height of the UAW's vicious anti-Japanese campaign in the 1980s. The function of this racist campaign was to redirect opposition to plant closures along national lines and divert attention from the UAW's own culpability for job losses.
