delphic con: episode 6

" when its all over
     we won't
        be  building 
            anything
           any one wants anymore  "
                       OPERATIVE X1567832 
                         in
                          rust bowl II


=============================================

delphi wants 
their  boyz and girlz 
to settle 
for tar heel chicken chop wages 


"It is important to recall 
that until the 1970s,
collective bargaining 
in the United States and Canada
was largely about 
workers demanding improvements
 from
their employers"


"a new era in collective bargaining
erupted at the end of the 1970s 
that was soon dubbed
'concessionary bargaining'"


.
"We are about to see 
the second wave of this attack 
on
the North American working class"

 " though The first wave did
not, of course, ever subside.....
things are all about to get 
         dramatically worse"

---------------------------------------

The events signalling this second wave are unfolding in
the American auto industry. The United Auto Workers
(UAW), under threat from General Motors (GM), opened
its collective agreement to save GM over $1 billion in
health care costs. UAW is currently in negotiations at
Delphi (a components division spun off from GM in 1999)
where the corporation is threatening to go bankrupt if
workers don't cut their wages to $10/hr from the
current $26/hour as well as surrender health benefits
and more or less reduce the union to a dues collection
agency that overseas a non-union workplace.

None of this is entirely new: American (and to a lesser
extent Canadian) workers in the airline and steel
sectors are all too familiar with concessions linked to
corporate restructurings from bankruptcy. But given the
pattern-setting role that the auto sector has always
played, the impact of these latest developments should
not be underestimated. And given that the US-Canadian
auto industry is the most integrated cross-border
industry anywhere in the world, workers on the Canadian
side of the border will not be immune from the
concessions pressures.

Several key questions emerge. Will this be just an
isolated bad-news story -- a tsunami-warning -- that we
can only hope misses us or at least doesn't do any
damage? Or will it be a wake-up call warning us that if
you're not fighting back, you're only waiting for
things to get worse? Is what's coming inevitable or can
it be resisted? The first concessions wave led the
Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) in a direction that
challenged neoliberalism, free trade and ultimately
their UAW parent union. What will the CAW response be
this time?

Any effective counter-response will demand some
creativity on the part of workers and their unions, and
a crucial beginning is that workers in the US and
Canada start talking about why this is happening and
what might be done. The following points, we hope,
might contribute to the discussion of what an
anti-concessions campaign must take up. 1. You can not
privatize the welfare state.

The first generation of postwar autoworkers used the
good times to achieve a host of social benefits, health
care and pensions being the most important. But in bad
times, and especially when the competition didn't carry
the same costs, those benefits came under attack.
Defending them in bargaining had its limits both
because the companies were in trouble and because
winning benefits which other workers did not have left
autoworkers relatively isolated.

The response to the recent GM attack on the health care
benefits of autoworkers should have been - as some
American rank-and-file workers insisted - to call for a
national health care program that extended this crucial
benefit to everyone, not taking it away from those
happened to have some protection. The UAW did
eventually make this point, but only after they had
made the concessions on cutting healthcare costs for
the company. Had they challenged GM and put the larger
issue on the national agenda, the union might have been
a catalyst for a larger struggle (and for taking a step
towards reviving the potential social leadership role
of unions more generally). But declaring this only
after the precedent that UAW workers would bear the
costs of cutbacks was set reduced the UAW statement to
empty rhetoric.

For Canadian workers, this may seem beside the point,
as Canada already has a national health care plan. But
isn't that health care system now under attack? And if
this leads to having to negotiate an increasing share
of health care privately with companies, what would
happen to the CAW's ability to negotiate wages and
other benefits? More important, however, is a larger
lesson from the UAW concessions: workers and unions who
get too far ahead of other workers when the situation
favours them, will inevitably get in trouble when the
winds change. Workers in leading sectors will
eventually be dragged down if other workers are being
pushed to the margins. Progress for workers has to be
generalized or those gains will be vulnerable to
reversal. 2. The problem isn't 'out there' from
globalization, it is in North America.

The main problem that the GM and Delphi workers face
isn't competition from China or Mexico or even Japan
but issues which can be directly addressed at home. As
Steve Miller, the head of Delphi said in a recent
speech: "...in the auto industry, Toyota, Nissan, and
Honda are competing from assembly plants in our back
yard...the old oligopoly has crumbled, not so much from
globalization, but from upstart domestic competition"
(October 28, 2005). In the parts sector, 80% of the US
industry is non-union and many of these plants pay less
than half the wages at Delphi (non-union parts also
increase the incentive to outsource even more from the
assembly plants).

The issue is not so different in Canada where the
overall industry is in fact doing well, but non-union
auto majors are winning a larger share of the market.
Here too Toyota and Honda won't be organized through
business as usual and neither will the parts industry,
where the level of unionization was once close to 80%
and is now approaching 40%. Unless the CAW shows the
same verve which unions showed in the 1930s when they
were able to organize workers in spite of times much
tougher than today (and in spite of dramatically fewer
resources than today's unions), breakthroughs in
unionization simply won't happen. In the 1930s, for
example, mineworkers sent 100 organizers to organize
steel workers so miners would not be isolated.

Although the auto companies are global, production is
overwhelmingly regional: cars sold in North America are
largely assembled in North America and made of parts
produced here. This makes organizing all the more
possible, especially if it is seen in cross-border
terms. Why couldn't the CAW and UAW, for example,
jointly declare: that the 10 major parts plants will be
organized; that the longer it takes, the more
disruption the entire industry will face; and that
there is no point moving form the US to Canada or
vice-versa because we will be there to organize (and
into Mexico as well)? And why would the UAW not put
US$200 million of its ever increasing and unused $900
million strike fund to such use, if only to defend its
own members? 3. Opposition to free trade is
nevertheless necessary.

Blaming globalization and free trade for everything can
be a diversion from more basic issues. Yet corporate
mobility does remain a threat and this will increase as
we escalate our fights. If we see the issue not as
other workers taking our jobs, but as the freedom of
corporations to do what they want with production
versus the ability of workers to influence their lives
and communities, then fighting free trade is a matter
of democracy (workers' freedom versus corporate
freedoms), of joining with other in the community to
fight the unilateral power of corporations, and of
international solidarity to avoid the ratcheting down
all global working standards.

To limit corporate threats of shutting down plants, it
makes sense to revive a variant of the former Canada-US
auto pact and use the leverage of the market to assert
that investing in North America is a condition for
making profits here. Such a pact to constrain
corporations and gain some controls over investment
flows would necessarily be extended to include Mexico
and Mexican workers. This couldn't be done alone: it
would mean a commitment on the part of unions far
beyond anything to date to join the global justice
movement. In turn, such a campaign might offer the
wider movement the kind of concrete example it needs of
alternatives to free or simply fairer trade in favour
of planned trade. 4. There is a need to question what
we produce.

The big 'no-no' within auto unions in North America is
questioning what kind of products workers are making.
This was not always the case. In the early 1950s, the
UAW was a national leader in calling for small but
safe, fuel-efficient vehicles. Leaving this decision to
the companies has neither helped auto workers nor
consumers. Time and again, the companies gave up on
this less-profitable part of the market to concentrate
on higher-profit big vehicles only to see its
competitors use this as a base for taking market share.
Now, an important part of the problems at the Big Three
of GM, Ford and Chrysler are not only cost but the
product. Where are autoworkers on this issue today?

The issue has been avoided in part because of the
belief that the companies know best and in part because
any criticism might hurt sales and therefore the jobs
people depend on. The problem is that whether or not
the companies know what their doing in terms of their
own interest, there is no reason to think it coincides
with the collective interest of auto workers or workers
more generally. And had we been pushing for vehicles
(and an entire transport policy) more sensitive to
environmental concerns - as we were warned to do by
environmentalists pointing to the trajectory of global
warming and the inevitability of rising gas prices -
auto and transport sector jobs might actually be more
secure today.

Consider one example. The Ford engine plant in Windsor
makes large engines. It has been clear for some time
that this could not last. Why is the union not out
front mobilizing publicly for Ford to move to develop
new kinds of engines, to convert the Windsor facility
to produce them, and to make any monies given to Ford
by the Canadian and provincial government conditional
on such changes? This may not offer immediate answers
to those laid-off, but it would position the union,
both in the community and nationally, as leading on a
social issue and this would be part of developing the
capacity to perhaps influence the direction of Ford and
positively affect jobs down the road. 5. There is space
to negotiate decent contracts.

It needs to be pointed out that the auto industry is
not leaving North America but competing to come in.
Overcapacity is more of an issue than plants leaving.

In Canada, because of the $0.85 dollar (in terms of the
US$) and health care costs, workers in the Big Three
continue to have space to negotiate decent contracts.
AS the CAW pointed out in a recent presentation,
Canadian Big three workers are $10 per hour cheaper (or
$20 thousand per worker yearly) than in the US. It is
true that Canadian parts workers must confront the
falling level of unionization in both Canada and the
US. But much of the low-wage, low-capital section of
the Canadian industry departed in the 1980s, leaving an
industry that is mid to high tech in value-added and
quality-based. This sector has the advantage that it is
not as easily moved, and that it must be located close
to just-in-time assembly plants. Of all the vehicles
assembled in North American, 1 in 6 are assembled in
southern Ontario, with a huge parts industry therefore
arrayed around Ontario as well.

A crucial question, however, is what to focus on in
bargaining. Working time stands out for three powerful
reasons. First, it is quite amazing that while
productivity has been growing (output per hour has
doubled since the first wave of concessions in the
1980s), workers are left with less and less of their
own time. Second, while higher wages in the Big Three
increase the gap with other workers, more time off is
solidaristic in terms of sharing existing jobs. Third,
and this is especially important in the US, the attempt
to limit the impact of job loss through income security
and higher pensions has increased costs for the Big
Three in a way that disadvantages them relative to
non-union assembly plants. But paid time off is
something the non-union plants tend to follow to avoid
unionization (or at least it can become a major issue
in organizing). So negotiating paid time off is
actually a better response even from the narrow
perspective of 'competitiveness'.

The time to negotiate paid time off may not be only
when things are going well. It may be that this is more
likely to be achieved when there are layoffs and the
issue is solidarity to limit the layoffs (the original
UAW Ford contract in the 1940s provided for going to 32
hour weeks before layoffs took place, a reflection of
the solidaristic culture then). Solidarity may also be
invoked to limit overtime when some are called back and
many remain off work. In most cases, the company will
plan to reduce the workforce even when the upturn comes
and so limiting overtime might become a permanent union
policy. 6. Militancy is not enough.

Worker militancy is fundamental to everything else. If
there no struggle over everyday issues and wages and
benefits, there is unlikely to be struggles over
anything. Parts workers do have power - in some ways
even more power than workers in assembly - because they
can shut down a significant range of assembly plants.

But militancy itself comes up against barriers that are
real and not just propaganda: non-union plants,
products that are not selling, corporations threatening
to move abroad. Sometimes this demands new strategies.
For example, if one plant is constantly disrupting
overall production, the companies may move it. But if
disruptions are strategically spread across various
plants at different times, no one plant can be targeted
by the companies.

This strategy, too, will come up against limits. The
key is that when workers come up against a wall in
fighting back, the question must not be how to retreat
but how to knock down that wall or how to scale it.
That is when we have to go beyond the everyday role of
the union and raise larger issues, deepen the
involvement of the members, and build broader class and
social alliances. 7. A rethinking of unions is needed.

A common thread running through all of this statement
is that: (a) in fighting concessions and building
unions, the need is to act now, and not wait for
further initiatives from the corporations; and (b) the
constant importance of building the capacity of workers
to respond so we can, in fact, have more meaningful
options in the future. Over the past almost thirty
years of neoliberalism, corporations and the economy
have gone through remarkable transformations. Unions
too have changed, but not always in positive ways and
not always in ways adequate to taking on the new
economic and political challenges. It is therefore
central to any successful working class response that
workers think about their unions and ask how they too
might be transformed. This is the difficult but
increasingly unavoidable question that workers and
unionists, and socialists and the Left more generally,
cannot avoid. aOc

aO"Sam Gindin teaches at York University and is retired
from the CAW. Other Resources on Delphi and the 'New
Concessions'