Joseph Kishore
22 August 2018
In a sentencing memorandum
filed Monday against the former vice president of employee relations at Fiat
Chrysler (FCA), Alphons Iacobelli, federal prosecutors directly connect payouts
to the United Auto Workers (UAW) to the effort to “obtain benefits, concessions
and advantages in the negotiations and administration of collective bargaining
agreements.”
The memorandum asserts that
FCA funneled far more than previously reported to UAW officials to “corrupt and
warp the labor-management relationship.” More than $9 million—twice the earlier
figure and six times what Iacobelli has admitted to—was channeled to union
executives through the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center (NTC) between 2009
and 2017, according to the filing.
The statement that the corrupt
relations directly impacted contract negotiations has the most far-reaching
implications. Autoworkers should consider the contracts imposed by the UAW null
and void, the product of an illegal conspiracy directed against them. This
applies not only to the contracts pushed through at FCA between 2009 and 2017.
The same corporatist relations prevail at all of the Big Three auto companies,
and they extend back decades.
The filing Monday is the
latest in a series of revelations in the expanding corruption scandal. Last
week, attorneys for Iacobelli filed documents asserting that the conspiracy to
influence contract negotiations preceded Iacobelli’s own involvement. “Mr.
Iacobelli joined an already ongoing conspiracy,” it states. “The practices and
corruption that are the focus of this case started long before Mr. Iacobelli.”
Describing the operations of
the NTC, the legal document asserts that UAW officials involved in the
operation “routinely had their own private charities, etc.” It continues: “They
had NTC-issued credit cards. They had access to large sums of money… Some
representatives of the union and the company did this for many years.”
The claims by both FCA and the
UAW that the scandal involves only “a small number of bad actors” (according to
FCA) and that “our leadership team had no knowledge of the misconduct”
(according to then-UAW President Dennis Williams) are being exposed as lies.
Among the revelations over the past week is the fact that now-deceased Fiat
Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne personally gifted the late UAW Vice President
General Holiefield a watch valued at more than $2,000 and then lied about it to
federal investigators.
Then-UAW President Williams
was himself implicated in a plea agreement released last month by Nancy
Johnson, the former top assistant to UAW Vice President for FCA Norwood Jewell.
Johnson asserted that Williams directed top UAW executives to use funds from
training centers to pay for luxury items and personal expenses.
These corrupt arrangements are
only the filthiest expressions of the overall relationship between the UAW and
the auto companies. Money and luxury gifts pass so freely from the company to
the union because these two organizations are on the same side. The UAW scandal
provides indisputable proof of what autoworkers experience every day: the UAW
is itself a pro-company enterprise, not a workers’ organization.
Autoworkers and all sections
of the working class must draw the necessary conclusions from this fact. To
advance their interests, workers need new organizations of struggle:
rank-and-file factory and workplace committees to organize and unify resistance
to the corporate and financial elite.
In 1984, the Workers League,
predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, pointed to the significance of the
UAW-company joint structures and ventures introduced more than three decades
ago. In Corporatism and the Trade Unions, the Workers League defined the
doctrine of the UAW as “corporatism,” that is, “a doctrine of the identity of
interests of labor and management, which leads to the unlimited collaboration
between bureaucrats and the capitalist state to defend the profit system no
matter how severe the consequences are for the working class.” The Workers
League accurately characterized the “Joint Skill Development Training Fund,”
predecessor to the NTC, as a “gigantic slush fund.”
The UAW became “UAW-GM,”
“UAW-Ford” and “UAW-Chrysler.” The intended result of these arrangements is
seen in the conditions facing auto workers today, imposed by the UAW through
the suppression of strikes, the acceptance of plant closures and layoffs, and
endless contract give-backs to the companies.
Hundreds of thousands of jobs
have been eliminated; full-time jobs have been replaced by low-wage, part-time
and temporary positions; the workforce has been divided into multiple tiers;
health care and pension benefits have been slashed; cost-of-living raises have
been eliminated; and the eight-hour day has been effectively obliterated.
The evolution of the UAW into
a corporatist syndicate and cheap-labor contractor is not an isolated process.
In the US and all over the world, the trade unions, based on their
pro-capitalist and nationalist program, have transformed themselves into
agencies of the corporations and the government.
Beginning in the late 1970s
and 1980s, the unions in the US responded to the globalization of production,
the decline of American capitalism and the right-wing shift in the strategy of
the American ruling class by joining with corporate management to lower the
wages and increase the exploitation of American workers, in order to increase
the competitiveness of US companies on the world market. The unions went from
putting pressure on the companies to raise wages to putting pressure on the
workers to lower wages. The executives who control these organizations were
handsomely rewarded for their services.
In the court filing Monday, prosecutors
assert that the money funneled from FCA was intended to “buy labor peace.” This
the unions are more than willing to sell.
In his argument before the
Supreme Court in the case of Janus vs. AFSCMEearlier this year, the lawyer
for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
said that the “agency fee”—that is, the requirement that all workers, including
those not in the union, pay the equivalent of union dues—is “the tradeoff for
no strikes.”
There could be no clearer declaration
of the role of the unions as the industrial police force of the corporations
and the government.
Those organizations, operating
in and around the Democratic Party, that oppose the formation of new
organizations of struggle, rank-and-file factory committees, do so from the
standpoint of covering up the nature and role of the unions.
Their aim is to prevent
workers from drawing the necessary organizational and political conclusions
from their bitter experiences with the unions.
To this end, the websites of
the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA) and other fake-left groups have said virtually nothing about the
UAW corruption scandal, which has been unfolding for many months.
Socialist Worker, the publication
of the ISO, which controls the Chicago Teachers Union, has not published a
single article on the UAW scandal. Nor has Jacobin magazine, which is
associated with the DSA. Labor Notes, which promotes various supposedly
dissident factions of the union apparatus, has published only one article—back
in February—which pathetically argues that the UAW can be transformed through a
campaign for the direct election of officers and regional directors.
These organizations speak for
privileged sections of the upper-middle class. They are terrified that workers
are moving into struggle and striving to break free of the stranglehold of the
unions. The teachers’ strikes earlier this year emerged as a rebellion against
the unions, which initially opposed the strikes and then gained control of the
walkouts in order to isolate them and sell them out. United Parcel Service
(UPS) workers are currently facing a joint conspiracy of the Teamsters and the
company to push through a contract over mass opposition, with union officials
denouncing workers’ opposition to poverty-level wages as “subjective” and
selfish.
The formation of new
organizations is the essential prerequisite for mobilizing and uniting these
and other sections of the working class. Rank-and-file factory and workplace
committees are the form through which workers can advance their own demands,
including the restoration of all contract givebacks, the elimination of tiers,
the permanent hiring of all temporary workers, an immediate increase in wages
for all workers, and genuine democracy and workers’ control in the work place.
The workers’ independent
committees, free from the bureaucratic grip of the nationalist trade unions,
will create the conditions for unifying workers all over the world in a common
struggle.
The World Socialist Web
Site and the Socialist Equality Party will do everything in our power to
promote and assist in the establishment of independent workers’ organizations,
connecting the growth of the class struggle to a socialist political perspective
and program.
We urge workers interested in establishing such committees
to contact
us today.
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