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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.