September 2003 • Vol 3, No. 8 •

As everyone but Rip Van Winkle knows, the U.S. economy since the 1970s has lost many jobs—millions of jobs, in fact, to overseas economies. Until recently, most of those jobs were unionized manufacturing jobs; but now there’s a growing trend for some categories of service jobs to be shifted abroad. In fact, some service workers find themselves training their overseas replacements, and then they’re handed a pink slip and sent out into the blue 2003 job market.

The loss of manufacturing jobs has been so severe in some sections of the country, that parts of the nation’s heartland have been renamed the industrial rustbelt, as plants continue to disgorge their workers, turn off the power and lock their massive doors.

Organized labor has mounted extensive campaigns to keep the manufacturing jobs inside the nation’s borders, mainly through political efforts and donations primarily to the candidates and officeholders of the Democratic Party. Sometimes political efforts have been partially successful, as when the Bush Administration imposed some tariffs, jointly sought by the old-line steel corporations and the steelworkers union. But the success of forcing up the price of overseas steel by imposing added taxes onto the price of imports has not halted the loss of unionized steel jobs, as steel firms continue to drown in red ink. But there have been clear failures as well. Most notably, when the Clinton Administration fought hard, it was reported, for Congressional approval of NAFTA, the trade pact that enrages labor officials, as much as the notorious Taft-Hartley Act ever did.

The union officialdom hasn’t had any more success in stemming the loss of good-paying jobs that are lost to automation, mechanization and the plain old-fashioned sweating of the workforce by speeding up the pace of work. And no wonder; the union officialdom as a whole has tied its members’ security to corporate America’s ability to profit from their members’ labor. So naturally, then, the labor officialdom champions the corporate bosses efforts for more and more increases in workers’ productivity; that is, the ability of workers to turn out more widgets today in less time or with fewer workers than yesterday. Experts argue whether or not more jobs have been lost since the 1970s to productivity gains than have been shipped overseas. But no one argues that the loss of jobs to productivity gains has been staggering.

At the first of the year, the Auto Workers Union (UAW) claimed 638,722 members some of them nurses, teaching assistants, writers or the like; that is far less than half the number the union claimed in 1980, when a much larger percentage of the membership manufactured vehicles or parts. Moreover, “The number of UAW workers employed by the Big Three and major parts suppliers has shrunk to 302,500 in 2003,” says UAW Concerned, a union caucus (Detroit News, August 3). The union’s current contracts, up for renegotiation this year, allowed the Big Three auto firms to reduce their workforce by thousands of union members. How many isn’t clear, but at the time the General Motors contract was ratified, labor writer Kim Moody estimated that 13,000 GM workers would lose their jobs over the term of the contract.

On the eve of this year’s contract talks with the Big Three, industry analysts are forecasting still more job losses for the United Auto Workers Union, as productivity gains and outsourcing of work allows the bosses to reduce the workforce “painlessly” by way of attrition. “The size of GM’s hourly work force will drop to 106,000 in 1907 from about 125,000 currently, while the Ford/Visteon work force will drop by 18,000 to 76,000 from 94,000 … The Chrysler Groups work force also will shrink by about 12,000 jobs to around 54,000 from 66,000 today and Delphi’s UAW-represented work force will drop to 24,000 from 31,000” (Oakland Daily Press, August 8). Ironically, the loss of some 50-60,000 auto industry members will allow the auto firms to force the unionized workers to share part of the cost of the “improvements” the union negotiates.

Some of those job losses will come about as new applications of technology allow automakers to make the plants still more efficient. “Flexibility” plans are on the drawing boards that make it possible to manufacture more than one type of car on a line or at a plant. Indeed, workers will soon be assembling both cars and trucks on the same line. The efficiencies that will be gained are obvious. One method allows scanners to signal to welding robots the type of vehicle coming its way, so that the robots can automatically adjust to make the correct welds. “In a recent interview, Roman Krygier, a Ford vice president, said that 75 percent of Ford’s plants would have flexible body shops by the end of the decade, saving $1.5 billion to $2 billion in manufacturing costs” (New York Times, August 19). Reducing assembly time will further increase Ford’s assembly capacity that the firm says already exceeds its needs by nearly one million vehicles.

A professor says that workers are already worried about what they see coming down the line as the auto moguls gear up for the new flexibility makeover. “In the past, auto workers were the aristocrats of manufacturing…. But flexible manufacturing not only makes the employer more profitable and the workers more productive it takes away power from the union. They’re worried about that” (Oakland Daily Press, August 8). Some auto workers seem more than worried, they seem to have given up thinking that there will be good auto jobs for them or their children, or even a union. One Georgia autoworker told the Times, “Probably the union is on its way out. You can’t find a good $30-an-hour job. That’s why I keep telling mine to stay in school, getting the education they need.”

The union tops at Solidarity House, the autoworkers headquarters, blame hemorrhaging jobs on their exodus overseas, the competition of foreign cars, even those made in the states, and the weak economy for declining union membership. And of course there’s a lot of truth in their explanations. What they fail to explain is why they haven’t fought for jobs lost to productivity gains in the auto plants and more generally in the nation. After all, one of the greatest accomplishments of the union movement has been its struggle to shorten the workday and workweek with no reduction in take-home pay. And that’s exactly what’s necessary right now.

Presumably, just about any union bureaucrat can collect dues, run a headquarters, enter into “partnership pacts” with the bosses, and watch the ranks numbers shrink year after year, contract after contract. And that’s the ranks’ problems. Like it or not, the UAW’s ranks are saddled with a bureaucratic stratum that long ago made its peace with the bosses.

Autoworkers will have no choice but to return to the militant tradition their union was once famous for. And replace the bureaucratic albatross on top that has been running the union into the ground for far too long.