Displaying items by tag: UAW

By Orlando Landuci

More than a year ahead for the presidential elections, the US is already in campaign. The Republican side, leaded by Donald Trump, carries as banner the figures of the economic bonanza sustained in the last three years. The Democrats, on their side, promote the impeachment to the President for the scandal of the Ukrainian connection, in an attempt to undermine him. Meanwhile, Trump’s constant attacks against the chairman of the Federal Reserve (FED, the American Central Bank), Jerome Powell, let us see the fears that the administration and the whole capitalist class have for the bleak prospect of a likely recession.

Signs

Although economists and analysts do not reach an agreement, there are clear symptoms of a slow down in American economy. In the first place, there are the figures of economic growth of world economy –that since the crisis of 2008 has not been able to recover and it can be characterized as a stagnation. The fall in the figures of world trade and the entrance of Germany in a recession, as well as the sustained weakening of Chinese economy; the uncertainty on the structural effects of Brexit and the last escalation of oil prices due to the bomb attack in the main Saudi refinery show a worsening of foreign pressures on American economy.

In the main statistics US economy still shows good health, with a decrease in the unemployment rate and 124 consecutive months of economic growth. Nonetheless, some figures cause concern. According to the PMI index, elaborated by the Institute for Supply Management, this August, for the first time in three years, manufacturing industry’s activity contracted, after four months of slow down in its growth. Industrial exports also show a fall in the last three months, which means that the interest rate of the 10-year bonds paid by the Treasury becomes higher than the rate paid by 2-years bonds. Without a solid economic explanation, econometrists have determined that this phenomenon keeps a correlation with the beginning of a recession at the short term. The fear to this is such, that the main imperialist Central Banks have began to revert their increasing interest rates policy, which were extraordinarily low after the launching of the “Quantitative Easing” (QE), that means, wild money printing, applied to ride out the most catastrophic effects of the recession of 2008. Trump’s rhetorical offensive against the FED comes from the idea that a new QE, this time preventive, is necessary.

USA and the World

EEUU y el mundo

As we have written before in other publications, Trump has faced a new orientation for American imperialism, with the aim of acknowledging the crisis of balance within the system of States established at the end of WWII. His policy, focused on attacking the imperialist postwar institutions, has been coherent, but has not yet been able to show a so called new order. Currently, the trade war with China is the main instrument to face the task of imperialist assimilation of the former workers’ States; Russia and –above all- China. This policy, that has for sure affected China, however, has also generated domestic problems in the USA by producing divisions among the different bourgeois sectors, that appear to be either benefited or badly injured (agricultural exporters, industries based on imported commodities) by the tariffs rise. For the time being, the bargaining with China is still on, without reaching yet an agreement, that would be the result of a war that has revealed to be not so easy to be won as the President had declared. In the Middle East, the break up of the nuclear agreement with Iran and the pressure on the European countries to make them also drop it has created even more instability. Trump bets all to the gendarme role of Israel, though the consequences of this instability appear clearly at every step –the last one with the drone attack on refineries of Saudi Arabia that has led to the stopping of 50% of production of the first exporter of crude oil in the world and the rise in the prices of the top raw material to industrial machinery to work in the imperialist countries. By the time this article was written, USA was evaluating a military attack on Iran in reprisal to their supposed responsibility for the attack, which call on revolutionary forces and the vanguard of the working class on guard to confront this new offensive of imperialism. We must stand for its defeat in the military field, if it decides to get into a new war against the oppressed people of the Middle East.

Before the events in Saudi Arabia, Trump had dismissed his national security adviser, Bolton, due to differences. One of the most important was the failure of the “Guaido Operation” in Venezuela, made up by Bolton as a more or less quick transition to get out of Maduro’s rule. Now Guaido is being accused for having links with the Colombian drug dealers and Trump seeks a direct negotiation with Maduro. In general terms, we could talk about major complications in the imperialist offensive on Latin America, where the structural reforms that the sepoy governments must impose are being stopped by workers’ and oppressed people’s mobilizations. The case of Brazil and the weakness of Bolsonaro’s administration to enforce the reforms and recover economic growth is resounding. But even more dazzling is the failure of the bet –with billions of dollars of the IMF- for Macri’s transition in Argentina. Trump’s influence to make the IMF give the greatest ransom loan in its history has today an uncertain future.

The greatest challenge

Trump intends to avoid being, like GW Bush, “the administration of recession”, even more taking into account that he bets all his electoral chances on economy. The contradiction of this imperialist course is that the only tool with which they count on to impose their way-out is the bourgeois State itself, based on a national territory –and therefore in open contradiction with the international character of productive forces. Trump’s orientation to try to revert the deterioration of USA’s imperialist hegemony is coherent, but it collides with the historical elements of structural crisis of imperialist decomposition. It will be very difficult that the pack of state measures to try to avoid recession (tariffs, FTA’s with other countries, interest rates lower up to less than 0%) will be able to counterbalance the deep trends of capitalist economy as world entity. 

But the greatest challenge is only beginning to develop in the field of production itself, with the coming out to struggle of workers of different industries; workers who don’t see the economic bonanza of the statistics reflected in their life conditions. Some people talk about a real labor unrest in the last years, with examples such as the strikes in Verizon (telephone workers), the 8,000 workers in Marriot (hotels) last year, the great teachers’ strikes in 2018, the 31,000 supermarket workers in the Northeast in early 2019. In total, almost half a million workers took part in strikes and block outs last year, reaching a record since 1986.

By the time this was written, 50,000 General Motors (GM) workers’, members of the powerful UAW union are on strike for the four-year contract bargaining. According to Credit Suisse, GM losses for the strike could reach up to $ 50 million a day. The Teamsters have declared solidarity by deciding not to cross the picket lines of the workers that blockade GM plants. This has led to a lockout in one of the plants belonging to the company in Ontario and possible problems in production in other GM factories in Canada and Mexico.

What do the workers of GM claim for? Although union bureaucracy of the UAW avoids to give any information about the details of the bargaining with the bosses and rejects the presentation of a concrete list of demands before the rank-and-file members, different interviews in the picket lines reveal the general content of what the workers are hoping to gain with this strike: recover what they have lost with the concessions that the UAW did to the bosses at the time of the Great Recession in 2008. This is, eliminate the two-tier contract system, make a permanent contract for temporary and outsourced workers, besides wage rise and health care benefits. That and to make GM take back their restructuring plan that includes the shut down of four factories in the US; a plan that shows how false Trump’s speech on repatriation of factories with his foreign policy turned out to be. GM has had three years of huge profits based on labor flexibilization introduced between 2007 and 2008; which the workers take as exceptional but that the bourgeoisie considers to be permanent in the sough for the establishment of a new relation between capital and labor. The confrontation is already there, as well as the evident centrality of the unions in their relationship with production. The “struggle for unions” appears to be clear, where Donald Trump’s promises blur away, while new trends like the Democratic Socialism seek to gain influence to lead the proletariat behind a bourgeois program incarnated in the Democratic Party. The struggle for the recovery of unions from a transitional program and a revolutionary leadership find a fertile soil in the current situation. The efforts of those who commit to the reconstruction of the IV International and its American section will be oriented in that direction in the next period.