https://socialistaction.org/2018/12/15/gm-shareholders-get-boost-and-workers-get-the-boot/
GM shareholders get boost and workers get the boot
/ 24 hours ago
DEC. 2018 GM (Eduardo Lima:CanPress)By GARY PORTER
On Nov. 29, analysts making 12-month price forecasts for General Motors
Co. projected $45.16 per share—an increase of almost 23 per cent over
the current $36.76. This is great holiday news, if you are shareholder.
That includes the GM directors who receive 60 per cent of their
compensation in stock options. It is critical, according to business
schools, to tie the interests of your directors to the interests of the
shareholder owners. But the interests of the workers are not considered
so tenderly.
The joyous forecast coincides with announced plans by the auto giant to
halt production at five factories in North America and cut about 14,000
jobs in the company’s most significant restructuring since its
bankruptcy and taxpayer bailout in 2008 by Stephen Harper and Barack Obama.
GM warned last summer that the trade war instigated by President Donald
Trump could force job cuts in the United States. Trump was irate with
GM, tweeting that he was “very disappointed” with the company and CEO
Mary Barra for plans to idle plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland.
“Nothing being closed in Mexico & China. The U.S. saved General Motors,
and this is the THANKS we get,” Trump wrote. But the Donald misses the
point. Just like him, GM does what makes the most profit. It is moving
to production of autonomous EV vehicles.
GM has a plan for the estimated $6 billion to be gleaned annually from
the plant closures. The all-electric, fully automatic,
no-steering-wheel, no-pedals version of The Bolt is supposed to be on
public highways by 2019.
However, what the world really needs is non-polluting mass
transportation—buses, street cars, trains, and ships. Left to private,
profit-motivated companies, the massive waste embodied in private cars
will continue. GM makes more money that way.
The only way to get the efficient public transportation systems we need
is to nationalize the vehicle business and retool the existing hi-tech,
modern plants. That way workers can be retrained, not scrapped. Workers
know everything about building cars. They can manage the factories. The
owners’ skill is in siphoning off profits and spiriting them away to low
tax havens. We simply do not need that skill. Let’s throw the bosses on
the scrap heap.
GM, over its history, has a long, very shabby anti-social record. It has
been a leader in some pretty bad causes. They include the fight against
regulations to enforce auto safety for consumers, the battle against
safety for its employees, and the drive against environmental safety for
the human race. GM led the resistance to greater fuel efficiency laws
aimed at reducing greenhouse gasses emitted from engine exhaust pipes.
Generations ago, GM led a consortium that bought streetcar lines, ripped
out the tracks, set up bus systems, and sold them. It also bought the
rights to an electric car and stifled it decades ago. GM, quite simply,
is a capitalist corporation that operates exclusively for private
profit. It has committed crime after crime to that end.
Under capitalism, the doctrine of individual “liberty” asserts the
absolute right of capitalists to make “free” decisions about their
property, entirely in their own interests—even when it throws thousands
out of work, leaves children without support, and causes the collapse of
whole communities. Their liberty is simply imposed on workers and their
families without their consent.
What about our “liberty” as workers? Up to Nov. 27, the Canadian Union
of Postal Workers conducted rotating strikes against Canada Post, a
Crown Corporation, opposing management-imposed speed-up, compulsory
overtime, and pay discrimination against rural, mostly female mail carriers.
The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau and the “opposition”
Conservative Party worked smoothly together to violate the workers’
“liberty” to withdraw their labour, their right to free collective
bargaining, including the right to strike, and ordered the workers to
end their job actions or face stiff fines.
Bosses can impoverish thousands of workers, but workers can’t even slow
down the mail, including the packages shipped by brutally low-wage
employers like Amazon. Only the labour-based New Democratic Party spoke
loudly against the move. NDP MPs walked out of the House of Commons in
protest. So much for workers’ “liberty.”
The Conservative government in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province,
under Premier Doug Ford, a hard right-winger and scion of a rich family,
has moved quickly since June 7 when it was elected. His Progressive
Conservative Party attained 61% of the seats, with only 40.5% of the
votes cast, in the first-past-the-post electoral system. The voter
turnout was only 58 per cent.
Ford has stripped many rights and statutory benefits from Ontario
workers, cancelled the planned increase to a $15/hour minimum wage, cut
welfare increases and made disability benefits harder to obtain. Under
his slogan “Ontario is Open for Business,” he is forcing workers to
labour under deteriorating wages, benefits, and working conditions,
fostering a level of desperation most convenient for the Walmart and
Amazon tycoons.
Ford seems to think he has every right to destroy the hard-won gains of
workers. But he says he can do nothing about the GM plant closures and
accuses federal politicians and union leaders of peddling false hope to
the workers.
UNIFOR, Canada’s largest private sector union with 315,000 members,
represents about 25,000 autoworkers including the 2500 in the GM Oshawa
plant. Jerry Dias, UNIFOR president, demands that Trump and Trudeau
impose a 40 per cent tariff on GM cars made in Mexico. His line is to
support his Canadian members by imposing cuts on the lower paid Mexican
workers. A spokesman for Trudeau said Dias’ proposal was not discussed
with Trump.
Dias also says he may urge a mass autoworker walkout from all Canadian
and U.S. plants, but a United Auto Workers union spokesman in the U.S.
says his union has no such plans.
Actually, a walkout is an excellent idea. But the American labour brass
is even more ossified than its Canadian counterpart. The UAW still
supports the capitalist Democratic Party instead of setting up an
independent labour-based political party like the NDP, which the
Canadian union bureaucrats dominate (although Dias and UNIFOR have
backed the Liberal Party of late, with bitter results).
Dias’ proposals simply have no weight unless he gets the backing of the
workers themselves. The leaders of UNIFOR like to parade as the workers’
saviours. This highly paid, privileged layer of union bureaucrats can
make a big noise; however, they bargained away hard-won worker gains
like equal pay and good pensions. They accept the so-called rights of
the owners to do as they please and fear the power of a mobilized union
rank and file.
In the end, it is only the mobilized rank and file that can force action
by GM and the capitalist politicians. Mobilizing the mass power of the
auto workers and of other unions in solidarity can bring home the point
that workers together can stop production, choke profits, and force boss
concessions—instead of making concessions themselves.
Photo: Eduardo Lima / The Canadian Press
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December 15, 2018 in Canada, Labor. Tags: GM
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