Bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of $11 billion, General Motors has been making record profits—and closing plants. According to striking GM employee Sean Crawford, who works at Flint Truck Assembly building the Silverado and the GMC Sierra, “GM doesn’t care about America, they don’t care what happens to our communities. Whole cities are being decimated by disinvestment. They can wave the flag all they want in their TV advertisements, but they’ve destroyed whole communities of people just trying to raise their families.” For Crawford, the most important two issues in this strike are putting an end to the creation of “temporary” workers—many of whom have been working side by side with him for up to six years—and bringing all workers up to the same tier.
That second point is key: According to Sam Gindin, who by the time he retired had spent decades as chief labor economist for the Canadian Autoworkers, “Part of what made the United Auto Workers so important for so long was the solidaristic union principle of equal pay for equal work. The level of equality in the auto industry was remarkable for decades because previous union leadership fought to keep the difference between skilled trades, assembly line, and even janitors minimal. Having extended this to women decades back, it has more recently been given up for new workers doing the same job as workers hired earlier.”
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More strikes are urgently needed to reverse the dangerous increase in American inequality. But the exciting strikes that have been electrifying the nation for the past two years have been led by a surge in bottom-up movements of the rank and file, mainly of women in the education sector. Workers at GM are reading tea leaves and official press releases, just like the media, and that’s no way to win a massive strike.
Yet, despite the many obstacles and tarnished national UAW leadership, everyone needs the workers in this strike to win. At General Motors, the autoworkers deserve real job security, a great contract that honors their tireless hard work, and new union leadership. To get it, they need to drive this strike themselves.