The 2007 United Autoworkers (UAW) agreements with the Detroit Big Three represented – as many people inside and outside the union have noted – the greatest economic concessions in the history of the union. Yet, in the course of that defeat, a remarkable opposition arose. It was led by a small group of activists who started late in the day and with limited organizational resources. At General Motors (GM), a third of those who cast their ballots voted against the agreement and at Chrysler the vote against the agreement was quite general at the large plants outside of Detroit. The question now is whether that oppositional base can be built on and what its first focus might be. 

Concessions and Competitiveness

There is good reason for U.S. workers to be sceptical about the argument that concessions save jobs. At GM, there were some 450,000 UAW workers at the end of the 1970s when the concessions began. In every subsequent agreement, concessions were sold as a trade-off for 'job guarantees'. Yet, when 2007 bargaining began, GM had all of 73,000 UAW members – more than 4 of 5 jobs were gone.

These job losses had many explanations, but not working hard enough or blocking productivity were not among them. Output per worker doubled in assembly between 1987 and 2005 and output per worker in the parts sector was only slightly behind, increasing by 85%).  And worker compensation, even with the higher health care costs, didn't even match that productivity growth.

Workers might be angry after losing their jobs in spite of working hard and being blackmailed into concessions.  But the outcome shouldn't surprise us. To some extent, the corporations couldn't really guarantee jobs even if they wanted to. To have a crack at protecting jobs, we'd have to move beyond the false promises of corporations and address free trade and the sanctity of corporate property rights. Moreover, reducing jobs was actually part of the competitive strategy of the corporations. So any move to some real job protection would have meant taking on the corporations and broader political battles; it wasn't going to be handed to workers when they were weak and making concessions. 

And that gets us to the key issue: the problem with concession-bargaining is not just the surrender of past gains with no improvement in security, but that in the process of buying into that logic, workers are weakened for subsequent struggles. And then, when concessions come up in the future, workers feel – in spite of their experiences – that giving in is even more inevitable than it was before. 

The New Hire Rate

There are few more obvious examples of this undermining of workers' potential strength than the New Hire Rate in the latest UAW agreements. The workforce is divided into 'core' (roughly assembly-line jobs) and 'non-core' (e.g. sub-assembly, machining, material handling, truck drivers, and – where they are still in the bargaining unit – janitors). The non-core jobs are estimated to run anywhere from 25%-40% of the workforce, depending on how much outsourcing has already been done. New hires brought into the non-core jobs will receive about half of the current wage rates and their benefits will be cut even more; new hires won't even be in the eroded VEBA (Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association) structure for retiree health care, and they will be excluded from the Big Three defined benefit plans. According to GM, this will cut the overall costs of a GM new hire to about one-third that of existing workers (Ward's Automotive, October 22, 2007). 

This is bad enough in itself, but if the company could get away with this, it might even push further. At Ford, there is already a new twist on this; Ford is allowed to have 20% of the workforce at the reduced new hire rate, even if they are in core jobs. [For more on the new hire rate, see: www.futureoftheunion.com/?p=5503 and www.soldiersofsolidarity.com].

How can workers possibly build the unity for future battles when the union has just implemented structures guaranteed to divide the workers?  How can unions develop a new generation of activists – crucial to reviving the movement – when the first thing the new workers learn is that the union has made them into second-class members?

Yet, isn't it true that health care costs were undermining the Big Three relative to Toyota and Honda?  And weren't Big Three wages far higher than their competitors? Did UAW members really have a choice?

Sam Gindin is retired CAW Research Director & current Professor at York University in Toronto.  This pc was reprinted from the Socialist Project Bullet www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet076.html