Editor's Note: Scott Marshall chairs the labor commission of the Communist Party, a steelworker, a trade unionist, and long-time workers' rights activist.
PA: What is behind the drive to cut wages and benefits at the Big Three?
Scott Marshall: Well, in terms of the autoworkers, it’s pretty clear that that is who make the profits for these corporations. What is at play here, of course, is that the corporations want more profits. And the way to do that is to bring down the wages, benefits, and working conditions of the autoworkers.
The other thing that is at play here is globalization. The US market is still a hugely important market for the auto companies, and they need to have market share here, even though all three of the Big 3 have huge investments overseas and rake in huge profits overseas. However, this is still one of the most important markets in the world. Their way of fighting for market share is to try to undercut the other auto companies, including the Japanese and German auto companies that are here. One of the important differences is that they are much newer and don’t have responsibilities, like the US companies, that they agreed to in the past regarding health care and pensions, etc. for their workers. So GM and the rest of them would just like to shed all that and not have to live up to their responsibilities – as a way of squeezing more profits out of workers.
Now, besides creating profits, what the autoworkers do for the economy is to raise the consuming power of the working class in general in this country. They set standards that raise wages for workers all across the board. But the auto companies can’t sell cars to people who don’t have enough money to buy them. So I actually think the cuts and concessions in these contracts that are being negotiated right now are really going to hurt the economy, because they are going to, in fairly short order, decrease the purchasing power of workers, and people aren’t going to be able to buy cars. It is also very shortsighted. Without a working class in this country that has the purchasing power to buy goods and services, these companies can’t make money.
PA: The two-tier pay system and the restructuring of health benefits are the two big items in the contracts. What will be the immediate impact?
SM: In terms of the two-tier system, fairly soon you’re going to have a whole generation of autoworkers who are making a lot less money with far fewer benefits. Let me just give you an example – this was in a New York Times article a couple of days ago. GM was crowing about the new agreement and talking about who much money they are saving by having this agreement, and some of the figures in there are really astounding. GM currently pays its average production worker somewhere around $70 an hour – not just wages – that includes everything, wages, benefits, retirement, all those kinds of things. Now new workers coming into those positions after this contract will be making about $26 an hour, and again that that includes everything. That’s not $26 an hour as a wage. That includes all the benefits and other costs to General Motors for each worker. Workers making that kind of money are not going to be able to buy cars – and it is going to happen quicker than a lot of people think, because the auto industry has an aging workforce. I think at GM the estimate is that 50% of the workers there are going to be ready to retire in the next 5 years. So you are going to have this huge influx of young workers without anything like the economic security and opportunity that the workers who are now leaving the plants won through hard struggle.
PA: On the health care issue, the New York Times also reported that one of things that came out of the GM deal was that GM has agreed to support the UAW’s call for single-payer national health care. Is that a substantive agreement?
SM: I don’t think it’s very meaningful at all, and in fact there was a similar agreement in the last contract. I don’t think anybody seriously thinks the auto companies will help lead any kind of fight for national health care. By the way, I’m not sure that the language includes single-payer or any of that. I think it’s very general about national health care. The bottom line is that GM, which previously had some motivation to be concerned about national health care, because they were trying as hard as they could to get out from any responsibility, now have no interest, because it’s off the books for them now. It’s not a problem for them anymore. So I think they are less likely to do anything about it now than they were before this contract.
PA: The autoworkers won at the point of production. They closed the plants down. They came out onto the streets and they marched, and the Teamsters supported them, the AFL-CIO, everybody supported them. But they couldn’t win at the bargaining table. We have a political regime in this country that has really swung hard to the right, and is determined to undermine workers’ rights across the board. Could you talk a little about the importance of taking this kind of class struggle beyond the point of production into other arenas?
SM: Actually, for the autoworkers that’s an incredibly important question. It’s an important question for all workers, really. When you start thinking about what happened to the autoworkers in these negotiations and the concessions they have had to make, you begin to think in broader terms about the issues involved. For example, let’s take the issue of national health care. Changing Congress, electing a Democrat President, and defeating the ultra-right Republican candidates in Congress is going to be extremely important in terms of being able to guarantee health care for autoworkers and everybody else. These VEBAS [Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Associations – the GM health care trust taken over by the UAW in the new contract – ed.] will continue for a while, but they are at the mercy of the market. The UAW already has two VEBAs which have failed, one at Caterpillar and one at Detroit Diesel. Those were not nearly on the scale of the GM and Chrysler VEBAs, but they still are an indication of how precarious such an arrangement is. At the end of the day, it is going to be only through political struggle that the autoworkers, and other workers, are going to be able to defend themselves in terms of health care.
It is kind of ironic, because for years in the labor movement, the thing that people have worried about and experienced – was that you can win something at the bargaining table and then have it taken away from you politically by the ultra right. The working class has to change that dynamic, because if you don’t have the leverage to win the things you need at the bargaining table, you are going to have to win them politically. That goes for health care, and it also goes for defending young workers and making sure that young workers in this country have jobs and benefits that allow them to support their families. So this is very much going to have to turn into a political struggle. Some of the setbacks that have occurred can definitely be reversed by political struggle.
The Employee Free Choice Act is also a critical question. I think that the UAW leadership underestimated the fight of their membership and the labor movement in general. Still, one of the main reasons they don’t feel they have the leverage to take on GM in a harder fight is because less than half of the autoworkers in this country are organized. That’s because most of the German and Japanese car companies are unorganized. They would have much more bargaining power and much more leverage with Toyota, Mercedes, Audi and Mitsubishi, if all those autoworkers were in the union.
The Employee Free Choice Act basically would give the unions not a level playing field, but a much fairer playing field to try to organize workers and to make that happen, and to return some of the clout and some of the bargaining power that the unions need to be able to face these giant corporations. I think it is really instructive that every single one of the Democratic candidates has embraced the Employee Free Choice Act and pledged to support it. It is also going to take some real change in Congress. There need to be additional votes in the Senate to override filibusters and presidential vetoes – and it is doable. I’ll tell you one thing that is going on – and I think the autoworkers sense it too – there is a real feeling that this can happen, and that probably by some time in 2009 we could really see this legislation pass. That will change the fight immensely.
PA: Finally, what do you see positive, if anything, coming out of the contract negotiations so far?
SM: There are two very important positives, I think. One is the incredible response you mentioned before by the rest of the labor movement: the Teamsters immediately refusing to handle anything having to do with parts or finished cars, refusing to cross picket lines – plus the kind of solidarity that showed up on the picket lines spontaneously, not just from other unions but also just from people in the neighborhoods and around the plants. Local pizza parlors were delivering food to the strikers at GM and Chrysler, even though the Chrysler strike was so short they didn't have time to get hungry. It just shows that there is a new feeling out there. I think the response to the strike is a visible sign of what a lot of people in the labor movement are feeling: That there is a real possibility to win some things now, that people are on the move, that people are fed up and are ready to fight. I think that really came through even with all the concessions, and I think that is one really important positive about the strike.
The other positive thing – and this gets back to your question about a political solution to some of these problems – is this. It’s really hard to figure out how you can have a modern economy that doesn’t have a manufacturing base, where goods are not produced and consumed. What the UAW tried to do at both GM and Chrysler – and we will see how successful they were – was to force the companies to invest in their production facilities in the US and guarantee that they would continue to produce cars at those facilities. I won’t get into all the details of it. It’s still all coming out, and it’s also not entirely clear how iron-clad those guarantees are – there are loopholes.
But just raising the idea that these giant corporations who have made profits for years and years in the billions and trillions of dollars, have a responsibility to the communities and to the people that made that money for them, made it possible for them to make those profits, is a really important idea. It really gets at the heart of all kinds of questions about democratic control. Even under capitalism, corporations have a responsibility to the communities in which they operate and need to be regulated by society. Currently they are regulated to a degree in terms of what they cannot do to harm people, but they also ought to be regulated in terms of what they owe society and what they should be contributing to society. Raising that question, that the people in this country, not just the workers, but the people in this country, have the right to tell General Motors that they have a responsibility to invest in this country and in the economy of this country is an important idea, and I think the UAW really opened the door to that discussion by demanding those kinds of investments.
