CHICAGO, October 7—The ongoing strike of close to 50,000 General Motors (GM) workers, now entering its fourth week, demonstrates the resilience and determination of the working class. They have braved the elements to maintain pickets for 24 hours a day, while earning just a fraction of their standard pay from the union strike fund. Workers from various different industries and unions, including steel and logistics workers, have demonstrated solidarity in both word and deed.
The GM strike also clearly revealed who the enemies and friends of autoworkers are. The United Automobile Workers union is a broker for labor, negotiating the workers’ exploitation rates. The union’s nationalism has led to ruining the lives of workers—from Canada and the U.S. to Mexico and worldwide. Workers can only rely on other workers. The highest manifestation of that solidarity and organization flows through an international communist organization: Progressive Labor Party.
Drive for maximum profit
However, the strike also brings to light many of the limits and contradictions of waging a nationally based labor struggle against an international business like GM. During the last decades of the past century, the auto bosses in the U.S. closed down many of their domestic plants, searching for cheaper labor costs in countries such as Mexico and India, as a means to better compete against the auto bosses in other countries. The sellout union leadership disarmed their rank and file membership for years to facilitate this de-industrialization. As it stands today, only 28 percent of GM’s total workforce is within the U.S. (Market Watch, 9/24).
Hardly a week after the strike began and GM bosses countered the U.S. strike by laying off over 1,000 autoworkers in Canada, followed by another 6,000 layoffs in Silao, Mexico (CNBC, 10/1). The GM bosses were able to counter the work stoppage not only by tapping into their billions of dollars in past profits stolen from workers’ labor,
but also by exploiting the lack of class solidarity of workers in the same industry but living in different countries.
Auto union is a lemon
The UAW is a defunct institution that serves the system, not the workers. It is up to the autoworkers to organize across the bosses’ racist borders to coordinate a unified struggle so that any advance for workers in one region wouldn’t come at the expense of workers in another part of the world. But given their longstanding history of nationalism, the union misleaders will never do that.
Road to revolution
Therefore, it’s on us as the international working class to unify our struggles, reject the bosses’ borders, and nationalism, and really hit the capitalists where it hurts. Even better yet, we will win more workers through an international solidarity movement into the revolutionary PLP, and build a communist revolution that crushes the bosses with their system of profits and unemployment. We will organize an egalitarian society where the working class is in the driver’s seat.