The potential for a movement uniting workers across North America was shown six years ago, when 70,000 maquiladora factory workers conducted a wave of explosive wildcat strikes.
The new battery plant will employ only 1,100 workers making between $15 and $17 per hour—only a quarter of the number who once worked at the now-shuttered Lordstown Assembly Plant.
GM continues to shrink its footprint and attack autoworkers’ jobs globally, as it faces declining sales and ferocious competition to dominate emerging technologies.
The effort by General Motors and the Confederation of Mexican Workers to certify their contract at the Silao complex is a warning to workers across Mexico about the anti-democratic content of the government’s supposed labor reforms.
January’s figures show that the jobs bloodbath in the auto industry is continuing unabated after the United Auto Workers’ sabotage of the General Motors strike last fall.
Workers from General Motors Customer Care & Aftersales facilities and other factories in Michigan are angered by continuous forced overtime imposed in the aftermath of the 2019 UAW sellout contract.
The presentations made clear that the United Auto Workers’ betrayal of the 40-day national strike by General Motors workers paved the way for massive concessions.
If the UAW has succeeded in the short term in forcing the company’s demands through, it has done so at the expense of even further discrediting itself among workers.
The shutdown of the strike has been followed by the victimization of workers who exercised their free speech rights by criticizing the company and the UAW on Facebook and other social media platforms.
The hard line by GM proves that the UAW is leading the strike to defeat and makes clear that workers must respond by expanding the struggle to Ford and Fiat Chrysler.
General Motors has received billions of dollars in government tax benefits over the past decade even as it continues to cut jobs and extract concessions from workers.
An op-ed piece in the Detroit Free Press by United Auto Workers President Gary Jones makes it clear that the union plans to use the threat to jobs to blackmail workers into accepting a new round of concessions in the 2019 contracts.
Workers and students are continuing to write in to the World Socialist Web Site expressing strong support for the demonstration Saturday at General Motors headquarters in Detroit.