USA
Lessons of the General Motors strike
Kim Moody analyses the revival of rank-and-file militancy in the US labour movement.
The recently settled strikes at two Flint, Michigan General Motors plants were the sixteenth and seventeenth local strikes against the giant auto maker since 1994. The strike by UAW Local 659 at the Flint Metal Center was ignited over Memorial Day weekend when management, using outside contractors, removed dies used to form parts (hoods and bumpers) for GM light trucks. This would have effectively meant the end of work that GM had promised the local union.
Union officials knew in advance of this action, but took no action to prevent it or to prevent UAW members in Mansfield, Ohio, where the dies were moved, from working with them.
The second local strike began June 11, when workers at a GM Delphi parts plant in Flint (Local 651) walked off the job.
Altogether there have been 22 strikes against GM since 1990. Many of these strikes have demonstrated the power of the union and the vulnerability of today's just-in-time production systems. Most have resulted in some additional hiring at a time when GM was trying to downsize.
Several, including this year's Flint strikes, showed that the union could impose modifications on the corporation's aggressive restructuring plans. In a few cases, such as GM's Warren, Michigan Powertrain plant last year and now at the Flint Metal Center, GM has been forced to backtrack on plans to disinvest or remove major facilities.
GM swore it would never let the union dictate investment decisions. But it was precisely on this matter that the union forced GM to agree to live up to a past promise to invest $180 million in the Metal Center.
In addition, the strike settlement appears to have put a temporary stop to GM's plan to spin-off Delphi plants in Flint and Dayton, Ohio. This temporary relief was enough to get overwhelming ratification for the strike settlement: 90% in the Metal Center and 76% in the Delphi parts plant, where the relief was less substantial. (Shortly after the settlement, GM revealed plans to sell Delphi.)
The union inflicted enormous damage on the company, which lost almost $3 billion in profits and $12bn. in sales during the fifty-four-day conflict. Strikes in just two plants closed twenty-seven of GM's twenty-nine assembly plants and over 100 parts plants in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Clearly, one lesson of this year's Flint strikes is that workers' power in the heart of international lean production has been magnified and the union's ability to broaden the scope of bargaining enhanced.
Major issues unresolved
But despite what these strikes showed about the power of the workers and their union, the major issues in all the GM strikes remain unresolved. Downsizing, outsourcing, spin-offs, speedup and workloads remain issues across General Motors North American operations.
GM's attempt to "catch up" with its competition is a permanent feature of capitalism. It isn't something that began in the 1990s. It has, however, accelerated under pressure from Wall Street. Whatever the speed of this process, it can't be addressed one or two local unions at a time.
The United Auto Workers' major contracts allow them to strike over local issues such as health and safety, production standards (speedup), and the subcontracting of skilled work. But this set-up from the 1940s and 1950s, (though updated in past decades) needs a big rehaul for the 1990s and 21st century.
There's nothing wrong about using local strikes to get at a vulnerable corporation. Indeed, the Teamsters used local strikes at Overnite even as the GM strikes in Flint were going on. But the Teamsters had a national objective?to force Overnite to sign to the National Master Freight Agreement.
It's not that the right of local union to strike over local issues should be jettisoned. Rather, issues such as speedup, outsourcing and downsizing need to be brought under the umbrella of national negotiations, to put greater limits on the company and to create a more favourable climate in which to pursue local resistance.
The UAW's leaders, however, refused to generalise the struggle or even, with GM almost completely shut down, to point toward a more national approach to these issues in the upcoming contract negotiations in 1999.
The most the union could come up with is yet another high level joint union-management committee to "head off further confrontations," as the New York Times put it. And a no-strike agreement at the two brake plants in Dayton, Ohio that brought the company down in 1996.
But several other plants were still lined up for possible strikes, including NUMMI and Saturn (yesterday's models of co-operation) and two other assembly plants in Bowling Green, Ohio and Janesville, Wisconsin.
When the settlement was reached in Flint, many of the strikers predicted a major clash with GM in 1999 national negotiations. They knew that regardless of the gains or losses in the current local settlements, the basic issues that affected all GM workers ? ongoing speedup, outsourcing, downsizing in violation of the 1996 agreement to maintain 95% of the workforce ?would remain unresolved.
Over and over and over
Looking at the fate of the seventeen strikes at General Motors plants in the last four years, we have to wonder why the union would want to repeat the same struggle over and over without resolving the basic issues that continue to fester across the company.
The UAW continues to insist that the issues in all the plants lined up to strike are simply "local." To be sure, compliance with the contract limits mid-term strikes to plant issues. But there is more involved here. Legally, the union can only strike and bargain over these issues. But it still possesses the First Amendment right to publicly discuss the national nature of these issues.
There is an enormous difference between the way the Teamsters handled the 1997 UPS strike and the way the UAW leaders addressed the public this year. Whereas the Teamsters aggressively addressed the working-class public, making their strike a fight for all working families, the UAW keeps a low profile insisting these were local strikes over local issues.
The union still has the option of declaring that these issues will come under the umbrella of national negotiations when it bargains new national contracts with the Big Three next year. But the UAW has done nothing like this so far.
Activists in the UAW New Directions Movement called for such an approach. They and a few more independently minded local leaders saw an opportunity to rally a broad movement against GM, to make these issues national ones, and to build greater solidarity within the UAW and with labour as a whole.
It was not to be.
Declining union membership
Nationally, the UAW has lost half its members in the last twenty years, despite the fact that there are almost as many auto workers in the U.S. today as there were twenty years ago.
The GM hourly workforce in Flint has plummeted form 78,000 in the late 1970s to 33,000 on the eve of these strikes. The "effective unemployment rate" among Black males in this 50% African-American city is about 27%. GM's total plan for downsizing Flint involves 11,000 more job cuts?a plan one UAW Local 599 official in Flint called "industrial racism." (Labor Notes, August 1998, 14)
The UAW claims this is because production has moved abroad, mainly to Mexico. But the bulk of lost union members is explained by other factors.
The first is speedup in the assembly division. In 1978, 328,000 workers stamped and assembled about nine million cars and trucks in the United States. Today about 258,000 workers stamp and assemble 12 million.
The second cause of dropping union membership is the growth of non-union parts plants and firms within the USA. The number of workers in this sector has grown from 352,000 in 1978 to 437,000 this year, but union membership has fallen from 75% of this workforce to around 10% by some estimates.
Yet the UAW leadership continues to hold to the fiction that its declining membership faces only local issues. Union bureaucrats cannot shake off decades of business union ideology and practice.
For twenty-five years following the Second World War, local strikes were really just local disputes. National strikes tended to be brief ceremonies (with important exceptions, to be sure).
In those days, "scabs" were not spoken of in polite society. But, at the same time, the ranks of labour became increasingly fragmented by a "private welfare" system in which company-based benefits tied the union and its members to the company and fostered an insular consciousness.
UAW leaders' passive behaviour and illusions have been reinforced by 15 years of "jointness" and labour-management co-operation in the name of "competitiveness," with its debilitating impact on union consciousness at all levels.
The problem is that the post-1945 deal on which all of this ideology and practice rested was broken a long, long time ago. Indeed, by the early 1970s there were multiple local strikes (e.g. Norwood and Lordstown) over speedup and other working conditions issues, as well as a wave of wildcat strikes over repression in Detroit plants. Most of these disputes were dissipated or squashed by the UAW's bureaucratic machinery.
The UAW's elaborate, multi-million dollar capital-labour partnerships have tended to disarm the union, while giving the companies time to outflank them.
Caterpillar, another exemplary UAW "partner," did more than break the deal. The company used the period of "co-operation" in the late 1980s to invest in non-union facilities all over the country and world, then resorted to scabs to break the union at home. GM did the same, though with less success.
"Partnership" or pretence?
In spite of its multi-million dollar "jointness" programme, GM turned nastier, under pressure from Wall Street and its shareholders. It resolved to downsize, outsource and otherwise cheapen its operations.
GM abandoned the practice if not the pretence of "partnership," even at the model Saturn plant. There was a series of smaller rank-and-file rebellions?first against union leaders, then against the "risk-and-reward" contract. Finally, an overwhelming strike vote in July 1998 marked the collapse of partnership.
At GM's NUMMI joint venture with Toyota, management went even farther and threatened to run the truck line themselves if the union went on strike when its contract expired on July 31. By the end of July, UAW locals at six GM plants were waiting in line to strike the giant corporation. And still the line was that these were all just local disputes.
GM's propaganda certainly has some effect on workers. How can anyone in today's dog-eat-dog competitive world argue for decent working conditions or secure jobs?
How, indeed?if, like so many business unionists, your world view includes so much of capital's priorities? If, for example, you can contort reality enough to believe that GM's competitiveness is the basis of job security rather than job elimination?
Many people fall back on that kind of thinking for lack of an alternative. And the UAW was certainly not providing such an alternative. In fact, the union's rallying cry was that GM was putting "America Last" as it invested abroad. Patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels in defence of business-union insularity.
Industry-wide problems
Problems of speedup, workloads, outsourcing and job loss are not unique to GM. Chrysler has seen two strikes, one a wildcat, in the last year. And there is more discontent beneath the surface. On July 26 the Wall Street Journal quoted UAW officials at Ford and Chrysler plants as saying the UAW national leadership has been too soft on management at those companies.
The problems vexing GM workers are rampant in Ford and Chrysler plants as well. It could not be otherwise in today's international auto industry, where competition first breeds over-capacity as firms struggle to expand market share; where lean production has become the job-reducing-work-intensifying norm; and where competitiveness finally forces everyone to reduce excess capacity.
The working class sees itself
Union leaders with vaguely social democratic views imagine themselves far ahead of their ranks in social vision, strategic thinking and political savvy. In fact, they have in fact been bypassed by a growing number of their members.
More and more working people understand the almost universal nature of the issues that led to highly visible strikes such as last year's UPS strike and those at GM this year.
Support for these strikes has been overwhelming. The polls show the public supporting the GM strikers by huge margins: 67% in a Flint-area survey, 74% in an ABC national Internet poll, and what NPR described as "overwhelmingly" in a Gallup poll.
Capital's own thrust over the past twenty years to restructure, reshape and transform how it produces goods and services in the forge of ruthless competition has made one-time workplace issues into social issues.
Herein lies not only better strike strategy, but the possibility of mobilising across labour and beyond?the hope of organising the unorganised.
At the same time, capital's unprecedented reorganisation via mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs have made it an even more visible target for working-class resentment. Add to this the equally visible explosion of upper-class incomes through skyrocketing executive salaries and bonuses and the astronomical growth of stock values and dividend income, and you have the makings of resentment?and class consciousness.
To be sure, this new consciousness must fight its way through decades of business union ideology, racism, social conservatism and the dead weight of so much "common sense."
Today's labour leaders are caught in their own contradictory ideology: On one hand, a business union outlook carrying the weight of a lost past and dead "partnerships;" on the other, a vague populism in search of relief from this "labour crunch recovery."
Still, the dynamics of the struggle at GM are revealing about the possibilities and limits of the moment. After nearly two decades of paralysis and near passivity, the rank and file in auto has begun to push for resistance at the local level, which for now is the only place they have the direct power to do so. Their renewed militancy has pushed the UAW leaders to open the gates of strike action and even to come up with a tactical approach to influencing the company?serial strikes that wound or cripple production.
Yet the ranks do not yet have the power to push the leadership to the next step: a genuinely national strategy for taking on the universal issues. And the narrowness of the leaders' strategy in turn holds back a broader working-class mobilisation, even if a largely symbolic one, in support of the strikers.
It is a situation begging for a breakthrough, but the necessary forces have not yet assembled. It takes more than one or two strikes to accomplish much, unless they are tied to building a broader working class movement.
In 1898, Socialist Labor Party leader Daniel De Leon told striking New Bedford textile workers that their strike would simply become one of a series of lost struggles, unless it was tied to the building of a broader labour and socialist movement.
His linear solution (socialist party plus socialist labour federation leading to the general strike) is not even an option now. But building on these struggles to create a class movement once again presents itself as a possibility?even if a difficult and still distant one.
The challenge for leftists is to build within the ranks the power and organisation to make the breakthrough?to take the local struggle to the national level and to reach out beyond the unions to a class that is beginning to see itself as a class.
* Kim Moody is the director of Labor Notes, a newsletter and network for US labour radicals. This article was first published in the US magazine Against the Current with the title "What Means This Strike?"
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