from the MICHIGAN CITIZEN:
Autoworkers demand revolution
Call for mass transit, inner city jobs, national health care, worker oversight and global unity, Wall-Street financed bail-out
By Diane Bukowski
The Michigan Citizen
DETROIT — Shortly before the U.S. Congress voted down a $15 billion loan package for the Big Three automakers, a caravan of Detroit autoworkers converged on Washington, D.C., Dec. 5 to join a national march and bring a rank-and-file perspective to the negotiations.
Their demands included re-opening and re-tooling closed auto plants, particularly in devastated cities like Detroit, to provide green energy and mass transportation. They also called for a national health care plan to relieve corporations of that cost, and payment by the banks, not the taxpayers, of the bail-out loan from the $700 billion Wall Street has already received.
“I am a granddaughter of a United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 600 autoworker and the daughter of an AFSCME (American Federat ion of State, County and Municipal Employees) member; unionism is in my family’s blood,” said Detroit Ci ty Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, who had just returned from Congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., on the proposed bail-out.
“The hearings have not been fair or respectful to autoworkers, who have a right to hold on to their jobs,” she said. “As a legislator for Detroit, I take offense to people sitting on high spitting out Detroit like it’s bad name. If the auto industry collapses, the national economy collapses as well.”
Council demands $10 billion bail-out for Detroit
The Detroit City Council passed a resolution Nov. 12 sponsored by Watson which called for a $10 billion bail-out for Detroit itself, to create jobs in public works projects, including building a mass transit system.
The resolution deals with high foreclosure rates by providing assistance directly to homeowners instead of spending it for demolition, as interim Mayor Kenneth Cockrel has proposed.
Dan Cherrin of Cockrel’s office said Cockrel supports federal funding to assist the auto industry and for infrastructure enhancements and improvements including: public lighting; improved roads; street lights; pedestrian crossings; additional funding to tear down blighted buildings; enhanced funding for workforce programs to help displaced workers and, funding for other projects to help Detroiters.
“The [interim] Mayor is not seeking a ‘federal bail out’ as so me on Council would like,” Cherrin said.
Frank Hammer, former UAW International Representative and former president of UAW Local 909, said autoworkers have held rallies in San Francisco and New York City as well as the rally held in Washington Dec. 6.
“We are the target; we are in the cross-hairs,” said Hammer. “They see an opportunity to get rid of U.S. autoworkers and the UAW. This is part of their deregulation strategy, which certainly has not worked on Wall Street. They want to slash our wages and get rid of retirees’ health care. This is our PATCO moment, and we’re not going to sit by like the labor movement did when PATCO was destroyed.”
PATCO was the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association, which went on strike in 1981. The entire union membership was fired by then U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
The New York Times and other publications across the U.S. have misstated autoworkers’ wages, estimating them at $70 an hour, according to author Felix Salmon of Portfolio magazine.
“The average GM assembly-line worker makes about $28 per hour in wages, and I can assure you that GM is not paying $42 an hour in health insurance and pension plan contributions,” said Salmon. “Rather, the $70 per hour figure . . . is a ridiculous number obtained by adding up GM’s total labor, health, and pension costs, and then dividing by the total number of hours worked. In other words, it includes all20the healthcare and retirement costs of retired workers.”
In an earlier article, Hammer estimat ed that U.S. autoworkers are worth $206 an hour, in terms of the value added to the companies’ production.
Autoworkers demand national health care
Hammer called on support for U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ House Resolution 676, which would provide national health care. Passage of such a bill would eliminate complaints that many in the U.S. are uninsured while autoworkers get lucrative benefits.
“We must join other developed countries that subsidize their industries by providing government health care, giving those industries a competitive advantage with the U.S,” he said.
He called on the banks to finance the auto bail-out from the $700 billion they just received from the federal government, and also addressed the issue of global warming.
“It is in a crisis stage right now, on the verge of an irreversible tipping point,” said Hammer. “We have to take closed plants and convert them to mass transport and rail [production] as opposed to private cars, with oversight over the companies by the workers, the unions, and the government.”
Tony Browning, a long-time worker at Chrysler’s Sterling Heights assembly plant, said, “The auto industry has a proven record of paying back loans in record time, as Chrysler did under Lee Iacocca in 1979. People are already losing their homes at record rates, families are breaking up, and20autoworkers are scared to death. We have to learn how to stand together in unity in record numbers.D
Estimates are that 300,000 jobs in Michigan will be lost, and 3.3 million nationally, if the auto industry goes under.
Other speakers noted that autoworkers in Flint had volunteered their time to build emergency vehicles after 9/11, and also sent vehicles to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Dozens of workers then proceeded outside in chilling cold to crowd into personal vehicles for a caravan to Washington.
Auto industry devastated Detroit, particularly Blacks
Key to the discussion is Detroit’s experience with the auto industry. Once its major economic base, Detroit was known as “The Arsenal of Freedom” during World War II as it produced not only automobiles, but planes and other military vehicles. After that period, a severe decline began.
Noted author and history professor Thomas Sugrue (“The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit”) estimated that between 1950 and 1990, the number of blue-collar autoworkers in Detroit fell from 214,000 to 104,000, as the industry migrated to the suburbs.
“The color of auto industry employees also got whiter over the last half of the twentieth century, as manufacturing jobs disappeared and as the auto industry became more bureaucratic in its organization,” said Sugrue. “In 1950, the auto industry employed 26 white collar workers for every 100 blue- collar workers; in 1990, it employed 63 white-collar workers for every 100 blue-collar workers.”
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Sugrue explained the role of race.
“Hardest hit by the loss of jobs in the central city were Black workers, who could seldom find housing in the segregated suburbs or the mostly white small towns that attracted many firms,” said Sugrue. “In the 1960s, social scientists began to observe what they called a “spatial mismatch” between working-class minorities and jobs. Most jobs were being created in outlying communities that excluded minorities. Getting from the central city to an outlying plant was time-consuming and costly. Those who hung onto their jobs often had to commute long distances.”
John Schmitt, economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research, said that auto industry “re-structuring” has hit Blacks hard across the U.S. as well, with non-unionized, foreign-owned plants in the South not hiring the Blacks proportionate to their population figures.
Schmitt estimated that Blacks across the country lost approximately 120,000 auto jobs between 1979 and 2006, with 2.1 percent of all African American workers in the U.S. in an auto-assembly related job in 1979. By 2006, that figure had fallen by one-third to 1.3 percent of all Blacks.
Overseas outsourcing
While the auto companies are crying broke in the United States, much of their profits continue to come from plants they have opened overseas.
According to various news releases, General Motors’ Chinese earnings already equal 54 percent of their North American ear nings. GM has been pouring $6 billion a year into its Chinese automaking plants, while Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen, which also operate U.S. plants, have invested over $4 billion in Chinese operations to pump up sales there.
About 30 percent of the 9.5 million vehicles GM makes annually are made in Asia, a ratio expected to jump to nearly 40 percent in the next five years.
GM plans to invest $1 billion in its Brazilian plants and has opened a $300 million Russian plant to compensate for slumping sales in western Europe and North America. The company has also opened a second plant in India, bringing its investment there to another $1 billion.
While Chinese plants are unionized, said Dave Sole, president of United Autoworkers Local 2334, “The outsourcing of work from the U.S. often goes to countries where the governments, supported by the U.S., have repressed or outlawed unions to keep wages down. Fighting outsourcing also means fighting U.S. foreign policy. All workers in all countries have to unite to fight for what they are really worth: good wages, pensions, and national health care.”
