The Autoworker Newsletter, published by the World Socialist Web Site, provides a voice for autoworkers and advances a fighting program to mobilize workers against the ruling class’ deadly “herd immunity” and back-to-work policies, and for the right to a good-paying, secure and safe job for all.
The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter insists that a successful fight is only possible by building new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file safety committees in the factories, democratically controlled by workers themselves and armed with a new political strategy.
In opposition to the “Buy American” nationalism and pro-capitalism of the UAW, we say workers in the US must unite with our brothers and sisters in Mexico, Canada and throughout the world against the global auto giants, and that the struggle must be based on a socialist perspective defending workers’ rights and interests—not the profit interests of the corporate and financial elite.
We encourage workers to join this fight and to send us information on workplace conditions. Contact us at autoworkers@wsws.org.
The Autoworker Rank-and-File Safety Committee Network is a national organization of workers throughout the auto industry who have organized to oppose the unsafe working conditions enforced in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic by the auto companies and the United Auto Workers.
While it is telling workers to shut up and keep working, the UAW has pulled its own stewards from the plant floor, and Solidarity House is still working remotely.
At least one worker, Mark Bianchi, is already dead, a relative confirmed recently on Facebook, and the United Auto Workers union has pulled virtually all of its shop stewards from the floor, pointing to an outbreak potentially without precedent in the US industry.
We demand that the company and the IBEW union make public all information, including dates and locations of cases, on the spread of the coronavirus in the plant.
The committee has independently confirmed two separate outbreaks on opposite sides of the plant, suggesting a larger outbreak may be underway.
A member of the FCA Jefferson North Assembly Rank and File Safety Committee describes management’s flouting of safety protocols at the factory.
Neither the UAW nor Ford has addressed any of the safety issues inside the Kansas City Assembly plant since production restarted in May.
Autoworkers are being deprived of the most basic information about the spread of infections in their workplaces.
A year after wildcat strikes involving 70,000 workers, the maquiladora workers in Matamoros are leading the fight against the dangers workers face from Covid-19.
After 26 years working for GM, Sergio Contreras was fired after he quarantined, challenging the efforts of the corporation to cover up COVID-19 outbreaks and continue production.
GM and the corporate-controlled Confederation of Mexican Workers have refused to provide workers with any information about COVID-19 cases in the plant.
The coverup of COVID-19 cases by GM and hundreds of manufacturing companies across Mexico is not only sanctioned by the López Obrador government, it is part of an official policy of under-reporting cases.
Asked about how workers should respond across North America, a worker said: “Through a strike protest to demand no reopening until it’s safe and the virus has been eradicated.”
The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter urges workers to support the GM workers at the Silao, Mexico factory, who were fired for supporting the 40-day strike by GM workers in the US.
After the historic wildcat strikes earlier this year, the channeling of a resurgence of struggles behind the trade union bureaucracy poses immense dangers to the working class.
During the first weeks of 2019, tens of thousands of striking workers brought to a halt virtually all the maquiladora manufacturing plants in the industrial Mexican city of Matamoros, just across the US border with Brownsville, Texas.
In a remarkable display of class unity and power, workers defied threats of retribution and violence from companies, union thugs, police and the military, and shut down a significant section of the closely-interconnected supply chain in North America.
Key to organizing their struggles across different companies and sectors was the formation of rank-and-file strike committees. Daily reports by the World Socialist Web Site played an important role in guiding the struggle and winning broader support.
In 2012, a management-provoked incident at the Maruti Suzuki Manesar auto factory outside of Delhi, India, was used as the pretext for the mass prosecution and frame-up of autoworkers, with 13 sentenced to life.
The struggle of autoworkers at General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler (FCA) in the United States in 2019 represented a major strategic experience of the working class, both in the US and internationally. Of particular importance was the 40-day strike by 48,000 workers at General Motors, which was isolated and betrayed by the United Auto Workers
The growing struggles among autoworkers are unfolding as a unified international process. Among the most powerful examples is the stand taken by the Mexican GM workers who organized their co-workers to defend the striking GM workers in America. In response, GM fired several workers at the plant in Silao. These workers have received powerful support from their brothers and sisters in the US and around the world.
With the assistance of the UAW, Iacocca closed or consolidated 20 plants and eliminated 57,000 jobs after 1979, including 12 plants and 30,000 jobs in Detroit alone. Over the course of 19 months, he imposed nearly half a billion dollars in wage cuts, or nearly $10,000 for each autoworker. In today’s dollars that would translate to $35,000 a year.
This article by WSWS US Labor Editor Jerry White is part of the Autoworker Newsletter’s campaign on the still-unexplained shooting death of a young autoworker in the UAW office at Ford’s Woodhaven Stamping Plant. Claims by the company and the union that Hennings was “on drugs” and “disgruntled” were discredited by the coroner’s toxicology report and by interviews with family members and co-workers on the WSWS.
Long known as “the strike heard around the world,” the Flint sit-down was led by socialists and left-wing militants who understood the irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the working class—whose collective labor produces society’s wealth—and the capitalist owners whose profits are based on the exploitation of labor. To prepare the coming battles of the working class it is necessary to assimilate the political lessons of history, including the great Flint sit-down strike 80 years ago.
Labor historian and WSWS writer Tom Mackaman punctures the myths surrounding the the former United Auto Workers president, and explains how the UAW’s transformation into a corporatist adjunct of big business and the state, and its role as an industrial police force deployed against the workers it nominally represents, is the outcome of his policies and career.
This article by WSWS writer Shannon Jones, written in the midst of the 2015 contract talks, examines the historical transformation of the United Auto Workers into a cheap labor contractor for the auto companies, and details its financial interest in exploiting the autoworkers it claims to represent.
Ford had not set out to redistribute wealth. His primary aim was to create a loyal and stable workforce so that he could make full use of the moving assembly line, introduced a year earlier, in 1913, at his Highland Park plant where the Model T was manufactured. But Ford’s $5 day, adjusted for inflation and divided into an eight-hour shift, was worth more than the wages for new hires implemented In the Obama administration’s so-called “rescue” of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009.
This article was written by Shannon Jones on the anniversary of the murder of Chin, a Chinese-American man, by an auto plant superintendent and his stepson at the height of the UAW's vicious anti-Japanese campaign in the 1980s. The function of this racist campaign was to redirect opposition to plant closures along national lines and divert attention from the UAW's own culpability for job losses.
