The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is holding a meeting this Sunday at 3 p.m. ET for global action to defend jobs at Warren Truck and around the world! To register, click here.
The United Auto Workers union held two rallies on Thursday and Friday to oppose Stellantis’ failure to keep its promises to reopen its Belvidere, Illinois, plant. Thursday’s rally was held at the local hall in Belvidere and was attended by a few hundred people, mostly laid-off workers and retirees. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain was the speaker. The second, much smaller rally was held outside the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) near Detroit and was addressed by lower-level officials.
Last Monday, several UAW locals filed complaints about the Belvidere plant, and the union bureaucracy threatened a strike, a maneuver to contain explosive anger over mass layoffs. For more than eight months, beginning weeks after the passage of the new collective bargaining agreement falsely hailed as “historic,” thousands of autoworkers have been losing their jobs.
The bureaucracy maintains a guilty silence. As Rich Boyer, vice president of the UAW-Stellantis, admitted, the union knew that the additional workers to whom the UAW had promised full-time positions would instead lose their jobs.
Two weeks ago, Stellantis announced nearly 2,500 layoffs at its Warren truck assembly plant near Detroit, part of a global corporate attack on autoworkers. At a local meeting, Warren Truck workers blamed the UAW apparatus for the cuts.
What we need is a global strategy to defend jobs that unites American workers with autoworkers around the world. This must be accompanied by a rebellion against the union bureaucracy that is helping to impose the cuts. By threatening a strike without having any intention of going through with it, the UAW is trying to prevent a labor rebellion.
At the rallies, UAW officials tried to strike a militant tone. But there were clear signs of nervousness. In Belvidere, every speaker began with a reference to the on-the-job death of Antonio Gaston, a former Belvidere worker who had been transferred to Toledo. Anger over his death was palpable among those in attendance.
Even in the relatively friendly crowd at the Belvidere, there were signs of resistance. One laid-off worker said she was angry that she had been denied a transfer to another plant in 2022 and denounced the unsafe conditions in the factories that contributed to Gaston’s death.
She said, “This kind of shit shouldn’t be allowed in a strong union,” as opposed to a situation where the union “allows the company to dictate everything to us.”
“So if you’re willing to fight for us, God bless you. But there should be a damn fight.” She continued, “If it hurts us, we’ll abide by the contract. If it benefits us, nobody fights… I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that way.”
Fain was stunned and had to go on the defensive. He lowered his gaze and his voice dropped an octave.
Neither the thousands of additional layoffs nor the developments at Warren Truck were worth more than a passing mention at the rallies. At SHAP, the Warren Truck issue was only raised when this reporter brought it up to the president of Local 1700. “It’s sad, it’s terrible. If it could happen there, it could happen here,” he said, without elaborating.
In Belvidere, Region 4 Director Brandon Campbell asked the rhetorical question, “Today it’s Belvidere, but who’s next?” He failed to mention that, in fact, more cuts were already underway.
Autoworkers everywhere have a duty to fight to reopen the Belvidere plant, but the UAW bureaucracy is focusing solely on this as a distraction from the layoffs it has approved and to isolate Belvidere workers from their colleagues fighting layoffs at other plants.
The UAW apparatus is trying to end the strike by Dakkota auto parts workers in Chicago to isolate them from workers at Stellantis. On Monday, the union announced a snap vote on a deal identical to the one workers had already rejected. When workers rejected it on Wednesday night, union leadership announced another vote on a nearly identical deal less than 24 hours later. When workers rejected that one on Friday, the union announced another snap vote for this Sunday.
To combat this sabotage and gain broad support, strikers have formed the Dakkota Workers Rank-and-File Committee.
Even as they adopted a militant posture, UAW officials repeatedly stressed that they did not intend to strike. “I want to be very clear,” Fain said, “our goal is not a strike. Our goal is to bring jobs and products back to Belvidere.” He promised to “fully utilize the grievance process.” But complaints often drag on for months or even years without a resolution.
Fain concluded: “My message to (Stellantis CEO) Carlos Tavares is you better get involved, otherwise the UAW will rebel.”
But last year’s “standup strike” resulted in the sell-out contract now being used for layoffs. The union boasted of “commitments” to $18.7 billion in new investments, but in reality negotiated a clause giving the company the right to pull out of those investments at any time if “market conditions” permit – the only reason companies make such decisions in the first place.
In reality, the bureaucracy does everything it can to prevent a strike or, failing that, to limit it as much as possible. This was evident in the turnout at the rallies themselves, especially in Sterling Heights. If UAW officials had been serious about their strike threat, they could easily have drawn tens of thousands of autoworkers in southeast Michigan to the SHAP rally, or at least thousands from the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, the largest in the region. Instead, almost no rank-and-file workers attended, and the union sent no high-ranking officials to speak.
Both rallies tried to pin the blame for Belvidere solely on the “mismanagement” of Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares. His claim that Stellantis was pulling out of Belvidere for “market reasons” was false, they claimed, because General Motors and Ford were making record profits. But they said nothing about the fact that those companies, like every other auto company in the world, are also conducting mass layoffs. They said nothing about the 1,000 layoffs announced at General Motors earlier this week.
Blaming management “incompetence” also serves to distract from the shift to electric cars, which automakers are using to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next few years. This raises deeper questions than the bureaucracy wants to discuss, including the nature of the capitalist profit system and the global nature of the attack on jobs.
In addition to Tavares personally, foreigners are responsible for taking American jobs, UAW officials claimed. This includes Tavares himself, who is from Portugal, and other foreign executives who “have no desire to build our company in our country,” as UAW Stellantis director Kevin Gotinsky put it.
Campbell, Region 4 director, attacked Stellantis for “shifting jobs” to Mexico and called for a consumer boycott of vehicles assembled in Mexico. This toxic “America First” rhetoric only serves to separate American workers from their Mexican brothers and sisters, who are fighting a fierce battle against poverty and have repeatedly asked American workers for support.
He then went into a contradiction, accusing Trump of sowing hatred against immigrants. In fact, Trump’s racist rhetoric has been a staple of the bureaucracy for decades, including the anti-Japanese campaigns in the early 1980s that led to the murder of Vincent Chin.
Significantly, UAW officials in Belvidere also praised Democratic politicians, including Congressman Bill Foster, who was a guest at the meeting, for generously providing Stellantis with tax and other financial incentives to reopen the plant. “These guys have stepped up…property has been bought up. Tax incentives, the money is there for this company,” one official said.
UAW bureaucrats continued to campaign for Kamala Harris after Fain spoke at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday.
During the question and answer session, Fain referred to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Chevron and declared, “That’s why this election is so important” – namely, the election of Harris. The decision in the Chevron case is just the beginning of a comprehensive attack by the court on other rules, he said. That’s true, but Democrats have stood by while Republicans have packed the court with an ultra-right majority.
Continuing a theme from his Democratic National Convention speech, Fain blamed Trump for the closure of GM’s Lordstown plant in 2019, even though the UAW itself co-signed that decision, and tried to contrast that with Biden’s record.
If Trump were president, we would all have been fired during last year’s “standup strike,” he claimed. (In fact, an even larger nationwide strike took place at GM in 2019, during the Trump administration.) Biden signed the UAW contract precisely because it paved the way for layoffs, as has been the case with every major national contract the White House has been involved with.
What the UAW officials reject above all is an independent political movement of the working class against the two parties of big business, which would also endanger their own positions.
Workers must see through the insincere rhetoric of the UAW bureaucrats. As long as the initiative remains in the hands of the bureaucrats, the only result will be more layoffs. Instead, workers must take the initiative and form a new rank-and-file leadership that will oppose both management and the union apparatus.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is holding a meeting this Sunday at 3 p.m. ET for global action to defend jobs at Warren Truck and around the world! To register, click here.
