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Lehman’s campaign for the UAW’s top position is taking place under conditions of an extraordinary and intensifying crisis, one which is gripping virtually all elements of the world capitalist system and is fueling the growth of the class struggle.
Workers at Ventra's plant in central Michigan voted down a UAW backed contract by 95 percent and are pressing to strike.
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker who is running for president of the United Auto Workers union, called for support to Ventra and GM Subsystems workers who are facing attacks on their pay and conditions.
In his video statement announcing the campaign, Lehman stressed that he was calling for an end to the UAW bureaucracy and fighting to develop a movement of rank-and-file workers in the US and in other countries.
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Deere & Company has announced plans to shift some production from Waterloo, Iowa to a facility in Mexico following a highly favorable second-quarter profit report.
Deere’s earnings and increased projections for 2022 confirm once more that Deere management and the union lied to workers when they told them nothing more could be won in their strike.
The election of May to the Ford board of directors has drawn favorable notice from business analysts due to his confrontational stance against Deere workers.
Workers have said the company and UAW are indifferent to the ongoing spread of COVID-19, which is surging in the Midwest.
At all Dana plants, the company is violating the terms of the contract and the unions are letting them do it. While the violations differ at each plant, our response at all plants must be the same: we must unite and take action ourselves, or things will only get worse.
Five months have passed since the United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Steelworkers (USW) rammed through a sellout contract for 3,500 Dana auto parts workers across the US, and workers are livid over the fact that the unions are allowing the company to violate the so-called “contract” without consequence.
Auto parts maker Dana Incorporated made $244 million in pretax earnings, a 492 percent increase from 2020, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
John Saraceno passed away under unknown circumstances on January 31 while working at the auto parts maker’s Fort Wayne, Indiana, plant.
Volvo workers now live under a UAW-imposed contract whose “pay raises” are being devoured by runaway inflation.
Workers at the plant still have not received copies of the contract, and are discovering loopholes that are cheating them out of holiday pay.
This lecture was delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2021 summer school, held August 1 through August 6, by Marcus Day, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site .
Sean, a US Army veteran in his mid-30s, spoke to the WSWS about the fall of Kabul.
The Autoworkers Rank-and-File Committee calls for the shutdown of auto plants and nonessential production, with full compensation to workers, until the virus is contained and workers aided by scientists determine it safe to return.
We are no longer prepared to accept the systematic sellout of our jobs and the constant deterioration of our wages and working conditions without a fight.
Mack Trucks workers must not let the company and UAW off the hook for letting the coronavirus run rampant throughout our community
The Deere Strike Rank-and-File Solidarity Committee calls on all working people to come to the defense of the strike by 10,000 John Deere workers, which the United Auto Workers union is seeking to shut down and betray.
Now is the time for Dana workers to join Deere workers and all auto workers to overturn the fraudulent contracts signed by the UAW in recent months and years.
This statement was issued by Volvo workers as they begin to return to work at the New River Valley plant today, following the UAW’s betrayal of a more than month-long strike last week.
Faureica auto parts workers in Columbus, Indiana, are angry about the cover-up of a serious outbreak of coronavirus at the Gladstone plant.
The Sterling Heights Assembly Rank-and-File Safety Committee calls on autoworkers to oppose the impending imposition of a 12-hour 7-day (12/7) work rotation at the plant.
Autoworkers are being deprived of the most basic information about the spread of infections in their workplaces.
The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter is assisting autoworkers in the building of a network of interconnected rank-and-file committees, connected with educators, Amazon workers, and workers in other key sections of industry.
Fill out this form to be contacted by someone from the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter and the Socialist Equality Party about joining the committee nearest you. If a committee at your workplace does not exist, we will help you build one.
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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.
The claim that the victory of SINTTIA in the vote by Silao workers represents at step forward is belied by the support it received from the corrupt, pro-management US union bureaucracy and the Biden administration.
Far from bringing a dawn of “union democracy” to Mexico, the AFL-CIO and the Biden administration are invoking the “labor reform” provisions of the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal in an attempt to suppress the growing influence of socialist internationalism via the World Socialist Web Site.
José Luis H., who worked in the plant’s car body area, was the last confirmed death, on December 19. The plant’s Human Resources manager, who had overseen the firing of workers for challenging the lack of protections against COVID-19, also died earlier this month.
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.
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.”
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.
While the present system by which the union’s ruling faction maintains its hold on office is blatantly undemocratic, its replacement by direct elections would not fundamentally alter the pro-corporate character of the UAW.
The sentencing of former UAW President Dennis Williams is the latest episode in a years-long federal investigation of top UAW executives that led to the conviction of 15 individuals, including Williams as well as former UAW President Gary Jones and former UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell.
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.
