The
United Auto Workers’ organizing drive at the giant Nissan plant in
Canton, Miss., once showed promise of becoming the biggest union
victory in the Deep South since the United Food & Commercial
Workers won bargaining rights—and a contract—at Smithfield’s
huge hog plant in Tar Heel, N.C., in 2008. A win at Nissan would have
been the first at a Japanese auto company “transplant” in the
U.S.
The
4.7 million square foot facility, with annual capacity for assembling
450,000 vehicles, opened 14 years ago and utilizes a workforce of up
to 6400 during production peaks. However, this includes hundreds of
managers and professionals and more than 2000 contract workers
provided by Kelly Services and not directly employed by Nissan. The
bargaining unit established by the National Labor Relations Board
included about 3500 regular Nissan production and ancillary
employees.
According
to Nissan, 46 percent of management is “minority;” 62 percent of
the workforce is “diverse.” But multiple sources report that
about 80 percent of those who were eligible to vote are African
American.
Historically, Black workers, North and South, have proven
to be more receptive to unionization than their white coworkers. But
every campaign is unique and demographics alone don’t determine the
outcome.
Organizers
have long realized that unions don’t organize workers—bosses do.
Treatment issues usually mean more than dissatisfaction with wages.
The Nissan workers are not working for poverty wages like those in
Tar Heel once were, or the fast-food workers fighting for “15 and a
Union” are today. Their relatively high pay for Mississippi, where
unions are rare, make those jobs sought after. But treatment is
another matter.
As
early as 2005, tiny groups started clandestine meetings to discuss
the need for a union and decided to contact the UAW. Proceeding
cautiously, by 2010 a reliable ongoing organizing committee
representing most departments had been established.
As
Nissan came to realize they faced a real threat, they began to
implement standard measures of spreading fear and intimidation. In
early 2015, citing concerns over labor relations guidelines of the
multi-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
the State Department offered to mediate the disputes in
Canton—promptly rejected by the company. Later that year, the NLRB
issued complaints against Nissan and Kelly for illegally threatening
to close the plant if an “outside” union got in. That complaint
is still outstanding and the union has since filed several additional
charges.
UAW
seeks community allies
After
the NLRB involvement, the field organizers were directed by Detroit
to reach out for allies in the community and sympathetic mass
organizations. They did a good job in pulling together a broad
coalition called the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan,
which included other unions and civil rights, church, student, and
environmental groups. They carried out civil disobedience actions
that convinced Nissan to reinstate a fired UAW worker in the plant.
This
past March, the Alliance organized a 5000-strong march and rally in
Canton that brought in workers from around the country—and Nissan
workers from Brazil—to show solidarity. The rally also featured
prominent speakers such as Bernie Sanders and Danny Glover.
Such
actions are vital to winning, whether it be initial organizing
campaigns or struggles by established unions. But the very success of
the Alliance appears to have led the top UAW leaders to rush a
premature bid for an election. The UAW turned in authorization cards
for a small majority of Nissan workers. A cardinal rule of successful
organizing is to expect that some support will be lost in a vicious
company campaign, and you will likely need at least 70 percent on
board from the beginning. Only after filing
did the UAW flood Canton with organizers to make crucial home visits
that should have been done months in advance.
It
didn’t help that the election came soon after the well publicized
defeat of a Machinists (IAM) attempt to organize a Boeing plant in
South Carolina. And just days before the vote, a rare scandal
involving collusion between a Fiat-Chrysler manager and a UAW
official in Detroit to embezzle funds from a joint training center
was making headlines.
The
United States has the most repressive labor laws of any
industrialized “democracy.” These make it difficult for even the
best-led organizing drives to succeed. Winning only guarantees the
right to bargain with the employer. Many never succeed in getting a
first contract. Failure to win a contract within the first year can
lead to a new election to decertify the union.
While
many good things were done right at Nissan, the end game chosen by
the Solidarity House bureaucracy certainly can’t be called well
led. But that won’t come as a shock to those familiar with the
evolution of what was once America’s most influential union.
In
competition with other unions, the United Auto Workers has long had
thousands of members in the aircraft and farm equipment industries.
More recently, they have organized university grad students. I pay
dues to UAW Local 1981—the National Writers Union.
But
the union’s bread and butter has always been the most important
manufacturing industry in the world’s biggest economy—auto. The
UAW was forged in the 1930s as part of the CIO’s turbulent
organization of mass-production industries that had been largely
ignored by AFL craft unions.
This
was a time of mass unemployment and success depended on winning
sympathy—and often active support—from the jobless. An early
turning point in auto industry organizing was the 1934 Toledo
Auto-Lite strike, initiated and largely led by socialists in the
Lucas County Unemployed League. Unionism during that period took on
the character of a broad social movement that could advance the
interests of all workers.
Often
attacked by police and the National Guard, the workers used bold
tactics to compel employer recognition and negotiations—like
sit-down strike occupations of the workplace and mass picketing to
block plant gates. Those tactics were later outlawed by the Supreme
Court and the Taft-Hartley Act. In the 70 years since Taft-Hartley
was enacted, labor’s perfidious Democrat “friends” have done
nothing to change that repression of our most effective worker power.
From
militancy to concession bargaining
The
UAW’s one-time domination in their industry made them arguably the
most important U.S. union, a pace-setter in collective bargaining
that created the semi-mythical “middle class.” At their peak, the
UAW had 1.5 million members—the lion’s share in auto. Now they
have a little more than 400,000.
Today,
coming off record sales in the U.S. market, there are only about
900,000 remaining American jobs directly related to the auto
industry. There are a number of factors for these dwindling
numbers—technology, imported vehicles, and off-shoring being the
biggest.
From
World War II to the late Sixties, the Big Three automakers—General
Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—were the dominant domestic producers of
cars and light trucks, and there were very few imports. The UAW had
national contracts covering all of their plants.
A
one-time socialist, Walter Reuther was elected president by an
Administration Caucus that continues to rule the UAW to this day.
With a wage formula of three percent annual productivity raises plus
cost-of-living adjustments secured, the union concentrated on
expanding “fringe benefits” eventually winning such measures as
good pensions with “thirty-and-out” early retirement;
comprehensive health insurance including families and retirees; and
supplementary unemployment benefits to maintain 90 percent of pay
during lay-offs.
Beginning
in the mid-Sixties, Japanese imports began to fill a niche long
neglected by the Big Three—smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.
Belated initial attempts by American companies to compete in this
market were plagued by design, quality, and safety problems.
Soon,
major Japanese companies like Toyota, Honda, Mazda, and Datsun (later
rebranded Nissan) started offering a full line of cars and light
trucks. And they began opening so-called “transplants” to build
them in the U.S. and Canada. More recently, Korean-based Hyundai/Kia
have opened U.S. operations and have become major players.
German-owned Benz, BMW, and Volkswagen also now build in the USA.
While
these “foreign” companies were all unionized in their home
countries, they were determined to remain “union free” in North
America. With the sole exception of a small group of maintenance
workers at VW’s Chattanooga factory, the UAW has not organized any
of the transplants since VW’s short-lived plant producing Rabbits
in Pennsylvania in the late Seventies.
The
UAW’s early strategy was to defend the Big Three both by promoting
Buy American and adopting a Partnership approach to make these global
giants “competitive.” This included new working conditions
emulating so-called “Japanese” quality production—actually
borrowed from 1920s methods at General Electric.
Soon,
UAW plants started competing with
each other to
keep jobs—so-called “whip-sawing.” GM and Ford spun off their
parts divisions from the national contracts. And when NAFTA was
launched in 1994, the union’s American “partners” began a
massive transfer of both parts and assembly work to Mexico. This led
to General Motors’ having more workers in Mexico than in the United
States.
That
only accelerated the UAW’s concession bargaining—leading to
debilitating historic give-backs in the 2007 Big Three national
contracts. To relieve the companies “retiree burden,” the union
agreed to accept a final lump sum contribution to establish a retiree
insurance trust to be managed by the UAW. Current active workers kept
their wage and pension benefits, but
all new hires would be paid at half the “legacy” wage and would
be enrolled in a much inferior retirement plan.
Hardly more than a year later, the new Obama administration dictated
further give-backs and plant closings in “managed bankruptcies”
at GM and Chrysler. Italian-based Fiat acquired ownership of
Chrysler.
All
this certainly made the Big Three more competitive—at the expense
of Big Three workers. The same give-backs also made the UAW very
noncompetitive in trying to organize the transplants. For eight
years, the starting pay for Big Three UAW members was less than what
new hires got at foreign owned rivals like Nissan.
“Partnership”
is an enfeebling, ultimately fatal disease for unions. The only cure
is a return to the class-struggle perspective that won the CIO
battles establishing once mighty unions like the UAW.
>> The article above was written by Bill Onasch, and is reprinted from Socialist Action.
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