GENERAL MOTORS AND THE UAW: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

By Jerry D. Rose

These days men and women who belong to trade unions must be ready to ask President Barack Obama, in the words of the old song composed for coal miners in Harland County, Kentucky: “Which Side Are You On?” They might also feel a bit like a woman who falls for a guy and takes him to her bed in what she had thought might be the start of a love affair when it turned out to be a one-night stand as he loved her and left her after he had had “his way” with her.

Barack Obama’s seductive advances toward the unions, although repulsed somewhat through the Democratic primary in the preference of voters for Hillary Clinton in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, was finally turned into a more substantial embrace for the general election in which he won 59% of the vote (compared to the 51% from non-union workers).

And well he should, based on his promises: to drastically revise NAFTA to the greater benefit of U.S. workers (though this promise lost some of its appeal when an aide whispered to a Canadian diplomatic that this was only “campaign rhetoric”); and he promised to support the Employees’ Free Choice Act, strongly pushed by the Unions and vehemently opposed by business interests, clearly a “sides” issue in which workers might indeed ask Obama “which side are you on?”

As Obama’s administration is 60 days and counting, they may still be pondering an answer to that question. When Obama visited Canada for his first meeting with a foreign head of state, he took the re-assurance to Canada about the “rhetorical” character of his anti-NAFTA stance out of his aides’ and into his own hands, with the usual obligatory declaration of wanting to promote U.S./Canada economic “cooperation.” Employees Free Choice has scarcely made a blip on the radar of administration concerns, perhaps because the business and financial interests to which Obama and his cabinet are so closely tied has mounted a ferocious attack against its enactment as the CEO of Wal-Mart, for example, has compared its enactment with the “end of civilization.”

Well, one might say, NAFTA reform and EFCA enactment may still be in the offing and the straying lover will ultimately come back “to bed” with labor once Obama becomes less busy with the pressing problems of trying to salvage the country from imminent financial collapse. It may be precisely in the arena of these efforts that American labor may experience the most profound sense of abandonment of the man whom they helped to elect as President. The issue de jure is a cliff-hanger decision about to be made (maybe already made by the time this is read) whether the U.S. government will grant a multi-billion dollar bailout to two automakers, General Motors and Chrysler. The decision, which appears to be scheduled to be made by Obama himself, is contingent on their satisfying certain conditions of “re-structuring” to make these companies more “competitive,” which largely comes down to lowering their labor costs by reductions in employee retirement or health care benefits. The U.S. government is treating these companies as the IMF has treated financially desperate third world governments with unpayable debts: we’ll bail you out but you have to make “structural adjustments” that amount to cutting out the costs associated with the nourishing of your human capital. As the President says, all “stakeholders” of the companies must make “sacrifices,” including their creditors and their management (as the CEO of General Motors has just “sacrificed” his position by resigning, apparently under Obama pressure). But union workers must know that there are “adjustments” in automaking policy that would make them viable and competitive without cutting their wages in a maneuver that will supposedly make company owners more wealthy as they make workers more poor. They must know (who doesn’t?) that if the Big Three automakers reformed their ways to build better cars so that people would actually want to buy them; and that if they followed Henry Ford’s example of paying his workers more so they could afford to buy Ford products, they could return these companies to profitability without doing it on the back of the impoverishment of their workers.

So Barack Obama and your team of shock therapy doctors in the mode of the Chicago School of Economics: “which side are you on?” Not forever can you pretend to be all things to all people. Not forever can you claim the mantle of the Democratic Party (if it has any of that mantle left) as the “party of the people” as you continue to do the will of Wall Street and the corporations. The people of your party’s heritage are those coal miners who got their heads busted in Harlan County, those migrant farmers of Dust Bowl time like Tom Joad who were assaulted in growers’ efforts to stop their unions from challenging their exploitation. Will you finally choose a “side” definitively on March 30,.2009 when you make that big “decision” of how many pounds of flesh must be taken from the hides of UAW workers in order to insure that these auto companies, too big to fail, shall “not perish from this earth?”

Which Side Are You On?

by Florence Reese

To hear Pete Seeger sing “Which Side Are You On?”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iAIM02kv0g

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist