It has been well over a week since US President Barack Obama rejected the restructuring plans of General Motors and Chrysler and threatened to throw the car companies into bankruptcy if they did not drastically downsize and impose even more “painful concessions” on auto workers.
Top executives at the two companies immediately pledged to accelerate plans to close more factories, lay off tens of thousands and impose deeper wage and benefit cuts on workers and retirees. If this cannot be achieved through negotiations, GM interim CEO Fritz Henderson said, it would be done through the bankruptcy courts.
In the face of this, the organization that claims to represent the 90,000 unionized workers and nearly 1 million retirees at GM and Chrysler has said nothing. United Auto Workers President Ronald Gettelfinger has not uttered a word, nor have any public statements appeared on the union’s web site. Asked why, a UAW spokeswoman told the WSWS, “the union has chosen not to issue a statement” and would not be “pressured” to do so.
This silence is highly significant. It can be explained only by the fact that the UAW bureaucracy is once again conspiring behind the backs of its members to impose massive concessions on auto workers.
UAW officials feel nothing but contempt for their members and prefer to keep them in the dark as the government, acting at the behest of the financial aristocracy, prepares to strip workers of their livelihoods and wipe out communities across North America.
The UAW’s previous policies, including its full support for President Obama, have been exposed as a complete failure. Noting the lack of response by the UAW, Reuters news service wrote, “Auto analysts see the union as shell-shocked by the hard line taken by Obama, a former community organizer who won huge support from the UAW and other unions in last year’s election.”
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This is not a question simply of mistaken politics. The UAW’s alliance with the Democratic Party reflects the role of the bureaucracy in subordinating the working class to the capitalist system. The interests of this organization—and the US trade union bureaucracy as a whole—are fundamentally antagonistic to the interests of the workers it claims to represent.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/pers-a09.shtml