The middle-class “left” and the UAW-GM contract

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/oct2007/left-o12.shtml

By Jerry White and Barry Grey
12 October 2007

This article is also available in pdf format to download and distribute.

The United Auto Workers-General Motors contract marks a turning point in the decades-long degeneration of the UAW. With this contract, the UAW goes into business as the proprietor of a multibillion-dollar investment fund. In return, it collaborates in the rapid replacement of older workers with a younger workforce at one-half the previous wage rate and without a pension plan, sanctions the abolition of employer-paid medical benefits for retirees, imposes across-the-board cuts in real wages, and accepts the continued destruction of jobs.

The contract represents the destruction of all of the basic gains won by previous generations of auto workers.

At the heart of the contract is the establishment of a multibillion-dollar union-controlled trust fund for retiree health benefits. The so-called “voluntary employees beneficiary association,” or VEBA, will turn the union into a profit-making enterprise and make the union bureaucracy full-fledged shareholders in the exploitation of the workers. The UAW bureaucracy will get its hands on a massive cash hoard, including shares in GM, which will ensure its income even as it administers ever deeper cuts in the benefits of retired union members.

The open transformation of the UAW into a business is not a sudden or unexpected development. The Socialist Equality Party and its predecessor, the Workers League, have been analyzing this process for decades. As early as 1992, we explained that to define the UAW and the AFL-CIO as working class organizations was “to blind the working class to the realities which they confront.”

Two facts demonstrate that the transformation of the UAW is not simply the product of the subjective characteristics of corrupt leaders or misguided policies, but rather the expression of fundamental objective processes rooted in the nature of trade union organizations and the impact of major changes in the structure of world capitalism. The first is the protracted period, now extending over decades, in which the unions have worked openly to suppress the class struggle and impose cuts in workers’ wages and benefits, along with massive layoffs.

Last month’s two-day strike was the first national strike at the largest American auto maker in 37 years, more than half the existence of the UAW—a period which saw a devastating decline in the conditions and living standards of American auto workers.

FULL story at link.