UAW members fight for union democracy

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The UAW yesterday and today... Above: 1937 sit-down strike. Below:

Assembly line at a GM-Isuzu auto plant in the 1980s.

The top union leaders no longer pay = = - AIFLD SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1988 7 KANSAS CITY, Mo.—Autoworkers have seen both the quantity and the quality of their jobs deteriorate during the 1980s. While the auto companies have stolen tens of thousands of jobs, the remaining workers labor harder and faster. Less people are doing more work.

Strangely, these vicious attacks have come under the guise of management and the United Auto Workers union (UAW) "working together." How has this bizarre situation happened?

Since the UAW helped bail out Chrysler Corporation from near bankruptcy in the late 1970s, other companies have cried louder and louder, "me too!" If the union would agree to job elimination and wage cuts for Chrysler-why not for General Motors or Ford?

The new catchword has become "competition." Auto executives plead that for their companies to survive, the union must help them cut costs. Otherwise, "foreign" automakers in places like Japan and Korea will have an unfair advantage. And then U.S. auto companies will go belly up, as Chrysler almost did.

At first glance, some of this seems reasonable. After all, isn't it possible to price one's goods out of the market? Doesn't a business have to turn a big enough profit to keep paying its bills? Isn't that how "free enterprise" works?

The trouble is, the world's auto industry is much closer to being monopolized than to being a free marketplace. U.S. auto companies financially interlock with foreign companies. Likewise, the companies' arguments have all been heard before. But, at an earlier time, the UAW rejected those lies!

The UAW's early years Back in the 1930s, management in the auto industry also spoke of "working together." But, unlike today, it was a time in which they were trying to keep the upstart UAW out.

Working conditions were horrible. Pay was inadequate, benefits non-existent. Favoritism and racial prejudice, not seniority, determined who worked which particular job. So when management spoke of "working together" and "not killing the goose that laid the golden egg," they offered the bosses' paternalism as an alternative to union power.

In response to these unacceptable conditions, autoworkers organized into the fledgling UAW. Union members had their own kind of "working together." It was called union solidarity.

Bitter struggles took place. The young UAW discovered that there is just one genuine way to make the bosses listen— shut off their flow of profits.

Auto workers by the thousands halted the assembly lines, locked the factory doors, and occupied the plants. They fought company goons and cops in the streets. And they succeeded in getting the UAW recognized—despite the earlier boasting by Henry Ford that he'd never allow a union.

By flexing its muscles, the UAW obtained contracts. It improved working conditions, wages, and benefits, and established seniority rights.

The union today more than lip service to the early methods of struggle. Times have changed, they say. "Foreign" people are stealing American jobs. Strikes don't really work-they just help foreign competitors.

So instead of fighting to maintain jobs and working conditions, the UAW is allowing the classification system to be gutted and the "team" concept to be introduced. "Innovative" contracts, such as those at GM's NUMMI and Saturn subBrooklyn, NY 11240-4830 IMPACT Post Office Box 404830 ISUALS 2-966-9619 Affordable photos, cartoons, caricatures and illustralions for the movement and the progressive press sidiaries, have become the norm.

Jobs in auto are rapidly disappearing, softened inadequately by job banks and retraining programs. On July 7, the Kansas City Times ran an article about these retraining programs. Interestingly enough, it obtained the story at a lake resort at a joint management/union four-day conference. ( In a city where over 6000 General Motors jobs have been lost in just twoyear's time, the Kansas City UAW/GM Resource Center and the tax-supported (continued from page terminated. He charged that the FMLN in El Salvador was killing children and its own members.

While listening to Radosh's pro-State Department diatribe, his audience had an unusual opportunity to read excerpts from his book, "American Labor and United States Foreign Policy," written in 1969. At that time Radosh held an exactly opposite opinion of the American labor movement's collaboration with the State Department.

Radosh said in 1969: "Rather than identifying with the forces for social change in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the AFL and CIO union leaders have offered their support to any anti-communist regime."

Radosh has changed his opinion, but the truth of what he wrote in 1969 was confirmed by William Doherty, director of AIFLD: "I was proud to be involved in CARE program expect to help only 675 laid-off autoworkers find new jobs over a 30-month period. An official of this program told the Times that most of these new jobs pay just two-thirds of auto wages.

Another official said, "If you can get 25 percent of these people to come into a self-help program, that's great." He complained of apathy and "unawareness" as reasons for low interest in the UAW/GM program.

But maybe laid-off autoworkers are aware. They are aware that their union is allowing good-paying jobs to go down the overthrowing Arbenz (in Guatemala), Goulart (in Brazil), and Allende (in Chile), he boasted to the conference.

Doherty had no mandate from American unionists for setting up dictators. All decisions have been made by the top echelons of the APL-CIO bureaucracy, without any vote from the ranks of labor.

Opposition in the unions But opposition has been expressed by a number of unions. As long ago as 1966, United Auto Workers union leader Victor Reuther declared, "They [the AFL-CIO] have permitted themselves to be used by the CIA as a cover for clandestine operations abroad."

This year, the California Federation of Teachers passed a resolution opposing any further funding of AIFLD. Teachers also spoke against AIFLD at the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which was held in San Francisco at the same time as the international-affairs conference.

For example, AFT Local 957 from San Jose, Calif., called on the teachers drain and presenting them with job resumés for quality jobs that don't exist.

Ferment in the union But while top UAW officials remain out of touch with the needs of their members, lower levels of the union show signs of unrest.

Examples of autoworkers seeking solutions are sprinkled around the country. UAW Local 645 in Van Nuys, Calif., threatened to organize a boycott of GM, if it should close the plant. A Plant Closing Committee in Detroit sought a legislation package that would declare a moratorium on plant closings.

In UAW Region 5—which includes Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas—a caucus called New Directions has sustained a two-year battle around union democracy and accountability.

When New Directions leader Jerry Tucker was cheated out of the regional director's seat in an election at the national 1986 UAW convention, the courts eventually found in his favor for new elections in Region 5. New Directions also benefited from the full support of UAW co-founder and leader Victor Reuther, who has become a critic of the "new" UAW.

Tucker's New Directions movement has been strong on criticism but short on solutions. It debunks the "competition" argument but distances itself itself from proposals such as industrywide nationalization.

Still, New Directions has afforded activists the opportunity to air their ideas, and it claims to want a return to traditional unionism—as opposed to the "company" unionism of today.

A big challenge ahead Tucker has publicly claimed victory in the recently completed Region S delegate elections. The victory will be short-lived, of course, if the international union "persuades" delegates to change their allegiance at the August mini-convention in Tulsa.

A Tucker victory would not decisively change the UAW as a whole, but it would demonstrate that UAW members can fight for a more democratic and accountable As for making the UAW into a fighting class-struggle union, the rank and file has a big challenge ahead. The auto companies will continue to try to destroy workers' gains from struggles of yesteryear.

Socialists in the UAW must continue to present a program of international labor solidarity against the capitalist bosses. We can point to the massive strikes and plant occupations by "competing" South Korean auto workers as an example of the kind of union power we need to coordinate our struggles worldwide.

convention to authorize cutting all ties to AIFLD "until such time as AIFLD makes public its budget, its employees, and the activities in which it is engaged."

AFT President Albert Shanker helped engineer the international-affairs conference in order to try to counter the opposition to AIFLD expressed by many teachers-union members and locals. Shanker sits on a number of boards that run the overseas operations in which the AFL-CIO is involved. He sees no contradiction in sitting with such anti-labor members as Henry Kissinger and Jeane Kirkpatrick.

In spite of Shanker's effort to build the international-affairs conference, virtually no local labor leaders from other unions bothered to attend. And many rank-and-file members of his own union, who had been roped into coming to the conference, took the floor to refute the speakers.

Some unionists pointed out that, rather than subvert the unions of other countries, the U.S. labor movement has an obligation to solidarize itself with all unions that are engaged in the fight for broad social progress.

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33,400 MEN ARE MADE IDLE; 'SIT DOWN' STRIKES CLOSE 7 GENERAL MOTOR PLANTS GM