Contradictions of the UAW GM Strike

Contradictions of the UAW GM Strike

The GM workers are on strike to end the multitiered wage and temporary workers wage system — ‘For Equal Pay for Equal Work’.)  This unequal wage system was brokered by the UAW bureaucracy and General Motors ‘Partnership’ in the 1980s.  The UAW Bureaucrats, at that time, sold the wage tier system in exchange for a wage increase for the UAW and selling out future GM workers (their sons and daughters) with the lower wage two-tier system.

Basically, the UAW Bureaucracy/GM and the National AFL-CIO Union/Boss partnership is opposed to equal pay for equal work and for unequal pay for equal work. The GM Workers need our full support and the support of all in this battle for equality!In the 1980s, after the defeat of the PATCO strike, the AFL-CIO misleadership announced that their new program would be to form a Partnership with Management. (When I was a union official I termed this a Domestic Partnership.) Some of them, also agreed in writing, to police local areas that opposed this ‘partnership’.

The Graph Below is a Graphic Example of the Decline in Standard of Living of the Working Class, Since the Trade Union Bureaucracy Declared Itself to Be ‘In a (Domestic) Partnership With the Boss’! Starting in the mid-1980sThis ‘partnership’ gave birth to the one, two, three, three ect. .. wage tier system! Selling out the futures of future young workers entering the labor force. And, since the lowest union wage is immediately the highest non-union wage, this wage tier system cut the wages of the entire working class!   When I was a union official, I called this system labors rush to the bottom!  As in graphically shown in this: Shadow Government Statistics Graph.  Leon Trotsky foretold the ‘Partnership’ Between the Trade Bureaucracy and the Boss:  From Leon Trotsky and the Iron Heel: 

One must accentuate especially the role which Jack London attributes to the labor bureaucracy and to the labor aristocracy in the further fate of mankind. Thanks to their support, the American plutocracy not only succeeds in defeating the workers’ insurrection but also in keeping its iron dictatorship during the following three centuries. We will not dispute with the poet the delay which can but seem to us too long. However, it is not a question of Jack London’s pessimism, but of his passionate effort to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches. The artist is audaciously utilizing the methods of hyperbole. He is bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism: of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal, to their extreme expression. He is operating with centuries in order to measure the tyrannical will of the exploiters and the treacherous rôle of the labor bureaucracy. But his most “romantic” hyperboles are finally much more realistic than the bookkeeper-like calculations of the so-called “sober politicians.” It is easy to imagine with what a condescending perplexity the official socialist thinking of that time met Jack London’s menacing prophecies. If one took the trouble to look over the reviews of The Iron Heel at that time in the German Neue Zeit and Vorwärts, in the Austrian Kampf and Arbeiterzeitung, as well as in the other socialist publications of Europe and America, he could easily convince himself that the thirty-year-old “romanticist” saw incomparably more clearly and farther than all the social-democratic leaders of that time taken together. But Jack London bears comparison in this domain not only with the reformists. One can say with assurance that in 1907 not one of the revolutionary Marxists, not excluding Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imagined so fully the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy. This suffices in itself to determine the specific weight of the novel.