https://socialistaction.org/2018/12/16/gm-layoffs-could-cost-40000-jobs/
GM layoffs could cost 40,000 jobs
/ 18 hours ago
Dec. 2018 GM Hamtramck (Elaine Cromie:DetFree Press
GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant is slated for closure. (Elaine
Cromie / Detroit Free Press)
BY JEFF MACKLER
For public consumption only, General Motors’ billionaire executives flew
on public airlines to Washington, D.C., in 2009, leaving their private
jets behind. Bleeding $1 billion in monthly losses, and threatening
bankruptcy, this corporation—once the world’s largest—eased its way to
the government troughs, with their kept media and the United Automakers
Workers (UAW) bureaucrats in tow, touting the necessity in those “tough
times” of “worker-boss cooperation.”
There they met with Steven Rattner, counselor to Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner and other top government officials who exist to do the
bidding of the ruling-class elite. Rattner then headed President Obama’s
White House Auto Task Force. Today, he brags in a Nov. 29 New York Times
op-ed piece that he “negotiated” the $50 billion GM bailout that further
eroded decades of UAW concessionary contracts, imposing even more
heinous provisions on workers—slashing wages and restricting or reducing
pension protection, health care, and other union gains that in previous
decades were considered sacrosanct.
With GM’s profits “robust,” according to Rattner, the behemoth has
announced plans to lay off 14,000 workers in some five plants in the
U.S. and Canada over the next two years. Estimates of total jobs to be
lost, including closure of GM’s associated complex of non-union parts
suppliers, are projected at 40,000. GM’s Lordstown plant, near Warren,
Ohio, which makes the Chevy Cruze, had previously eliminated its second
shift. It’s slated for closure in March 2019.
No “worker-boss” cooperation schemes found their way into Rattner’s
unqualified defense of GM. Although he joined the Democrats in scoring
Trump’s trade and tariff policies, while essentially agreeing with those
policies, his fundamental solutions never veered from his view that
declining capitalism in the United States, faced with ever-deepening
competition around the world, had no alternatives other than to extract
another pound of flesh from U.S. workers—and workers around the world.
Like most big-time auto manufacturers, GM constantly shifts production
to low-wage, low-tax, and barely corporate-regulated countries, from
Mexico to China. GM has repeatedly abandoned operations in the U.S. and
Europe. Most recently, it announced that its new Chevy Blazer would be
produced in Mexico.
In contrast to its 2009 poor-mouthing, GM’s $581 million purchase of
Cruise Automation not long ago saw it turn a profit in increased
valuation of $14 billion in the single transaction. Meanwhile, nearly 10
years after its government gift/bailout, it has yet to repay $11 billion
that remains of the $50 billion it owed to the government.
Indeed, if there were public access to the actual 2009 bailout terms, it
would likely reveal the usual fine print loopholes, wherein GM, as well
as the myriad of other failing corporations and banks at that time,
would pay back significantly less than the trillions of dollars they
received. Promises to invest these bailout funds in new job-creating
industries, of course, never materialized as the elites turned instead
to frenzied stock-market speculation, driving paper prices to historic
highs in today’s casino capitalism. Indeed, GM’s most recent massive
layoff announcement was followed by a similar market surge.
Today, we must add to the list of government gifts to GM, its share of
the bipartisan $1.5 trillion in tax cuts aimed at boosting corporate
balance sheets. In all these matters one fact remains constant. What is
granted to the rich is taken from the vast majority of working people.
GM proudly announced that its projected plant closures would save the
company $6 billion, a figure that they calculated would be achieved by
shifting production to meet the “public’s demand” for larger SUVs as a
result, they insist, of today’s low fuel costs. At $50 per barrel on
world markets, this halving of fuel costs over the past decade has been
matched at local gas pumps, where monopoly prices prevail. GM also
blamed President Trump’s steel tariffs, which officials claim cost GM
another billion dollars.
Need we add to the profit equation GM’s receipt of government
“incentives” to produce electric cars, which it barely does? A little
more than one percent of the 17.1 million cars produced in the U.S. last
year were electric.
GM’s defenders, including Rattner, add to their justification
“unexpected” factors that they claim affect auto sales, from the
“threat” of electric cars to the onset of ride-sharing apps that they
claim will “discourage vehicle sales.” They add to these fake arguments
the more substantial and overriding need to remain competitive on world
markets by deploying robots and related technological advances that
substitute machines for human labor.
What can socialist, labor, environmental, and human rights activists
surmise from these horrors? Here some inescapable conclusions:
• Capitalism operates by its very nature to extract profits from working
people regardless of the cost to human beings or the environment.
• The automobile industry is bound in a death grip to the doomsday
fossil fuel industry. At a time when indisputable evidence that
continued reliance on fossil fuels threatens the future of all humanity,
the U.S. has increased its fossil fuel output while simultaneously
pressing for the production of ever more polluting vehicles that depend
on it.
• Capitalism has zero interest in seriously considering any
scientifically and socially viable alternatives, whether they are in the
construction of a massive system of free public transportation to
largely replace automobiles or the massive and nationwide introduction
of a clean and sustainable system of energy production. Such projects,
at the initiative of an aroused and fighting working class that
challenges capitalism’s core prerogatives—including the private
ownership of the fossil fuel industry—would provide jobs for all in the
millions at top union wages.
Capitalism cannot be reformed. It must be challenged and defeated. This
is the job of a mass revolutionary party deeply integrated in all
working-class struggles. Socialist Action aspires to build this party.
Join us!
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December 16, 2018 in Labor.
Related posts
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