Over the last year SOS, Soldiers of Solidarity, has held meetings of workers from Delphi plants in states including Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, New York and Wisconsin. The largest meetings have drawn up to hundreds of Delphi workers and supporters. Reporters have flocked to the meetings to find out if Delphi and therefore GM might be shut down. The major action theme of the meetings has been "work to rule" on the shop floor -- adhering to company rules so tightly that work is slowed down -- and preparing for a possible strike.
What is the context for this new network arising at Delphi?
US auto companies have long sent work to parts suppliers such as Lear and Johnson Controls. The "Big 3" bought cheaply from outside the company what had been made inside by higher-paid UAW members. The UAW bureaucracy complained a little, then tried only to ensure that the outsourced, lower-paid jobs were also UAW. As long as outsourcing was piecemeal, the outcry from UAW locals usually didn't bother the Big 3 or the UAW bureaucracy. The UAW has effectively abandoned its ban on locals' outbidding each other ("whipsawing") in permitting outsourcing and other concessions to "save jobs" -- jobs that are then on the next chopping block.
This downsizing was not fast enough for the Big 3. They wanted to send out many thousands of jobs at a single stroke. GM spun off its parts operations as Delphi. Ford spun off a fourth of itself as Visteon. There were suddenly tens of thousands of UAW members at Delphi and Visteon who had been paid as GM and Ford workers. In one company there were enough workers -- with collective clout with the parent company relying on them for parts -- to feel their power to fight back. At first the "spun off" workers were promised nothing would change. But they are now faced with devastating wage and benefit cuts. Once-enviable pensions are so precarious that financial gurus advise workers to "discount" their pensions against lump sum "buyouts" of their jobs, as if pensions were corporate bonds: perhaps better to take $1 of buyout money now than gamble on keeping $2 of future pension.
Part of the Delphi strategy is to threaten bankruptcy. US laws permit companies to nullify union contracts and impose new pay and benefit structures, overseen by pro-business bankruptcy court judges. The Chief Executive Officer of Delphi, Steve Miller, cynically told a business audience that bankruptcy is a "growth industry" in the US.
The UAW, has -- at least for now -- the right to strike if the contract is torn up. Whether the UAW, airlines, and other unions will call strikes is a watershed question for the US union movement.
SOS picketed the flagship US public event of the international auto industry, the Detroit Auto Show. It has rallied workers at other events, including picketing Delphi headquarters (see slogans at end of article). SOS intervened in the UAW International Convention this summer, although it gained few votes in the bureaucratically-run Convention. SOS is not as focused on winning office in the UAW as previous UAW opposition movements were. But the broader political opening that SOS represents was expressed at the UAW Convention by SOS member Rob Wilson, who told a Detroit reporter: "Look at the recent immigrant marches. That should have been a good catalyst for us to march to Washington for national health care."
SOS's public pressure on the companies and the bureaucracy forced out of GM some relief for Delphi workers, including GM backing for Delphi buyouts. If SOS remains active, it will be harder to get rid of pensions. On the shop floor, SOS showed that if there is no respect for grievances, the plant will be unmanageable. This pressure helps all workers, union and nonunion. Steve Miller knows he can't have chaos on the shop floor while he tries to satisfy customers. GM, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Visteon study Delphi when making their plans.
SOS is a movement in the tradition of UAW dissident movements, including the New Directions Movement and the UAW Solidarity Coalition. I am proud to be a Ford-worker member of SOS. I hope to help apply SOS strengths and methods in organizing with my fellow "Ford Empire" Visteon workers, who will be the next blindfolded and stood up against the wall.
I want to attempt some constructive criticisms. Some involve factors that SOS had little or no control over and thus are what I see as objective weaknesses rather than mistakes.
SOS was founded almost entirely by rank-and-file workers responding to shop-floor leadership. While this included past dissident UAW officials who are still active, it did not include a new progressive split by UAW officers. SOS proves there will be fightback regardless of what existing leadership does. But I think the road to success is complex. A "united front from above" as well as "from below" is needed to divide the bureaucracy sufficiently to get mass action. Any "mass" opposition of thousands in the UAW will contain elements of the former bureaucracy. How can such a split in UAW officialdom be brought about?
I think SOS underestimated its own potential in relating to bureaucratically-organized but important "informational" picketing at Delphi plants. SOS can embrace and promote officially-called UAW actions to get a hearing for its more radical shop-floor, strike-action and union-democracy demands. It is still conceivable that there will be some kind of official UAW strike action.
There are models that fall between action initiated by the UAW International and shop-floor action that bypasses union officers. At American Axle (a more successful and smaller but very important GM spinoff), UAW dissident-officer leadership was crucial in bringing about an official strike over a contract. The strike probably could not have happened without dissidents in office.
There are Black, especially Black women leaders of SOS. But SOS needs better to reflect the overall workforce. SOS should become more rooted in nearby-community activism.
"Work to rule" requires even more discipline than striking. It can be hard to quantify results. It can make individual workers targets for discipline. And unless workers have control of the shop floor, it is the company that makes the "rules" to which workers are "working". Yet there is a long international tradition of "work to rule" that SOS taps into. Whatever its problems, the slogan "workers rule when they work to rule" has rallied Delphi activists to a high level of solidarity.
With buyouts and retirements, plant closings and forced or voluntary transfers dispersing SOS activists away from their historic bases of support and replacing them, if at all, by half-pay temporaries, some SOS activists think "we missed the moment." It's more like "the larger labor movement missed us," but the remaining and new Delphi workers will face the cuts without historic shop-floor leaders. In one case, a grandmother who is an SOS leader must leave a job more suited to her age and take a grueling assembly-line job.
Will SOS develop ties with new, younger workers so the movement does not "retire" along with the older workers? Perhaps dispersing SOS activists to the remaining plants will connect them to the younger Delphi workers, and to GM workers watching their generation's children's house on fire. Maybe an "SOS Visteon" will arise. Will SOS's fledgling ties with Delphi, GM, Visteon and Ford workers abroad develop into real joint action? Both Delphi and Visteon plan to become smaller in the US and focused on international development. Most Delphi and Visteon workers' potential allies will be international.
The ills of SOS are largely those caused by the retreat of the labor movement as a whole, a retreat SOS is too small to reverse by itself. Politically, rebel activists need an alternative to the capitalist Democratic Party. And SOS and the rest of the labor movement need to realize more fully that not only past but future strengths of the labor movement depended and depend on working with revolutionary socialist organizations committed to the labor movement.
SOS machinist, shop-floor organizer, journalist, speaker, and UAW Convention delegate Gregg Shotwell put on a suit to get into Delphi CEO Steve Miller's presentation to the Detroit Economic Club and report back on the capitalists' cabal to those of us picketing outside in the rain. Gregg wrote:
Yes, he [CEO Steve Miller] had to acknowledge the soldiers of solidarity. He said we have a right to speak out, which is more generous than some of our local union leaders. He said his favorite picket sign was "Miller Isn't Worth a Buck". "It must have been a typo", he quipped. It was a proud moment for me. I made that sign. My coworker, Juanita Cadman, has carried it in three protests in three cities...
The isolation of Delphi workers is not a fight-to-win strategy -- it's a bound-to-lose maneuver. The Delphi struggle must be supported by GM-UAW members and framed in the broader context of social equity for all Americans... Any deal that does not commit the corporations to advocate side by side with the unions for national health care is a hopeless half measure...
While the corporati wallowed in the warm sty of mutual flattery, the industrial landscape of Detroit disintegrated all around us, and a cold rain descended on the luckless and the damned. The third-world status of Detroit's inner city is emblematic of cities all over the United States... The destitution was engineered for a purpose: to control labor costs. Solidarity House is surrounded by sweatshops.
Shotwell's article, introduced by New Directions Movement leader and former UAW Region Five Director Jerry Tucker is at http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/shotwell190406.html. Visit www.soldiersofsolidarity.com and www.futureoftheunion.com and read Shotwell's newsletter Live Bait & Ammo. Consistent coverage of SOS is found at www.labornotes.org.
Make all temps permanent now!
Uphold union contracts!
Solidarity, equality, democracy are not bargaining chips!
Fully fund pensions, not crooks' pockets!
We've done our share, now it's management's turn!
Yes to corporate accountability!
No to corporate immunity!
Delphi executives should be arrested, not rewarded!
Delphi workers should be protected, not attacked and extorted!
End bonuses for Delphi execs until pensions are fully funded and all temps are made permanent!