Auto Workers Under Attack

Oct 14, 2024

After the UAW strike last year against the Big 3 auto companies, the UAW president Shawn Fain declared that the agreement reached was a “record, historic” contract. Many autoworkers voted against the contract. But UAW leaders used this claim of a “record” contract to help convince a majority to ratify the agreement. Even today, the media continues to talk about how much the autoworkers won and they continue to refer to it as a “record” contract.

But the only “record” that auto workers are seeing today are record job cuts. Ford, GM, and especially Stellantis have been firing workers, laying off workers and speeding up the remaining workers. As soon as the ink was dry on the contract, Stellantis began firing 2,000 temporary workers. In the last few months, Stellantis has laid off a whole shift at one plant and announced layoffs at most of their biggest plants, planning to put more work on the workers who are left.

All of the Big 3 auto companies today are increasing their exploitation of the workers in order to increase their profits. At the same time as Stellantis was starting layoffs, CEO Carlos Tavares, with his 39-million-dollar compensation, announced another three-billion-dollar stock buyback for their ultra-wealthy stockholders. Ford and GM did the same, giving billions to their stockholders, money that rightfully should have gone to auto workers.

Auto workers gained some small raises through their strike, but it never was any “record” contract. Auto workers’ wages are still below where they were 20 years ago, when adjusted for inflation. And this contract never addressed the working conditions in the plants, which are bad and will get worse after all these layoffs.

What happened after the 2023 auto strike is similar to what has been happening for decades. The union leaders reach a contract agreement, with or without a strike, and push the workers to ratify it. Workers are told that if anything is lacking, they will have to wait for the next contract to solve it, that everything is settled for the next four years.

But for the auto bosses, things are never settled. They never wait. All the auto companies keep on doing what they do—getting rid of some workers and forcing others to work overtime hours at a faster pace.

The auto bosses use their authority to make all the decisions in the plant, to control production, to decide how many workers are needed. Union leaders tell the workers that we can’t challenge the bosses’ authority, that we can only rely on the contract to protect ourselves. They tell workers we can’t fight back beyond what’s written in the contract. But workers don’t have to accept that.

Workers can decide to make a fight any time they are ready, contract or not. When workers are organized and ready to fight, they have the power to not only challenge the bosses’ authority to control production, but even to take control of production themselves.