Support the day of action on March 6th as part of the campaign to free Mansoor Osanloo, the elected leader of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, arrested and tortured for trade union activities. His detention is just one sign that what totalitarians fear most is an organised working class. More details here.
A strike at TRW Automotive, a small auto parts manufacturer, has shut down Chrysler’s minivan plant in Windsor. Production lines at other feeder plants have come to a halt as well. Management has threatened to use replacement workers, scabs, if the strike isn’t settled soon. Windsor already has the worst unemployment rate in Canada. It looks like this strike could be long and ugly.
After years of losing market share to the Japanese and Korean auto makers, and with the spectre of China shipping exports in the near future, GM, Ford and Chrysler have sought to recapture profitability by downsizing and speedup: closing uncompetitive plants and increasing the intensity of work for the remaining employees. Then last fall in the US, the United Auto Workers union agreed to two-tiered wages, with new hires earning about half what older workers make, permanently.
The Canadian Auto Workers have pledged to oppose the two-tiered system in their own negotiations later this year. But the union has already accepted the principle of outsourcing: taking work out of the major assembly plants and giving it to parts suppliers who pay lower wages. They did this with the understanding they would be allowed to organize the parts plants without opposition from management.
The 175 workers on strike at TRW have been earning $11.25 an hour building suspension modules, about a third what Chrysler workers were paid when they built the parts in house. A recent settlement at another parts company saw a similar wage rate increased to $15 an hour, rising to $17 at the end of the contract. That plant was owned by Magna, which has a no-strike pledge from the union.
It looks like the 4,500 Chrysler hourly employees who have been idled by the strike will not get the wage loss insurance benefits they usually receive when the plant is shut down. The new management at Chrysler believes they don’t have to pay out because the shortage is caused by a labour dispute. CAW Local 444 represents workers at both plants.
Meanwhile workers at Windsor’s Ford operations are still lobbying the federal government to match the province’s offer of $30 million to help reopen the engine plant. Last week’s federal budget didn’t address the issue. Ford says it will go elsewhere with a new product if the Tory government doesn’t come on board.
Not long ago Ontario replaced Michigan as the leading state/province in auto assembly and parts manufacturing. Now, with the drop in the American dollar, we’ve become the world’s most expensive place to build cars.
Regardless of the outcome of the strike, the prospects for auto workers and their families are grim. We are experiencing the relentless rationalization of capitalism, just like, in recent decades, the coal miners, the truck drivers and the meat packers.
So Barack Obama is planning, should he become the next US President, a ‘government of all the talents’. What a load of cock–not to mention proof, for those who are still not convinced, that the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties are vanishingly small. Political enemies–the manifestation of opposing social forces–are to be defeated, not for holding hands and a quick fumble behind the bike-sheds. The two parties are strands of the same milieu–whatever the outcome, the business of USA Inc carries on regardless.
