Worker takeover of NUMMI

I loved this until I got to the demands.

Perhaps we could collaborate on developing a factory handout that calls for takeovers in the name of Distributism?



NUMMI/Toyota Workers and Friends:

Only YOU can save NUMMI workers’ jobs!

Organize NOW to occupy and take control of the plant!

Greetings to the workers of NUMMI from your supporters in Oakland, New York, Japan, Latin America, South Africa, and New Zealand! The news of your struggle to stop Toyota from closing the NUMMI factory has spread to your fellow workers far and wide, and they stand in firm solidarity with you in your battle to keep your plant open, save your jobs, and preserve your communities.

One thing is clear: You cannot achieve your goals by relying on politicians – Democrats or Republicans – to bail you out. Governor Schwarzenegger recently cut state workers’ salaries by 15%, and has slashed the budgets for schools, parks, and other services working people rely on. President Obama has managed to get Congress to spend billions of dollars to benefit Wall Street and the stockholders of the auto companies, and to fund the oil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But Obama will never deliver on health care reform, the Employee Free Choice Act (also known as EFCA or the card check law, which will make it easier for workers to organize unions), or any of the other changes he promised during his campaign. Anything the workers achieve will be through massive class struggles against Obama!

The ugly truth is that our country is controlled by the rich and powerful, and operated in the interests of the big corporations they own. They are the only ones who will get bailed out by the government when they are in trouble. The rest of us have to rely on working class solidarity and militant class struggle actions.

As for Toyota, it has shown that despite its official corporate slogan of “mutual trust between labor and management,” it is no friend to its employees, even in Japan. In 2006, Japanese Toyota workers were so unhappy with the company’s treatment of long-term temporary workers, who did the same jobs as permanent workers for half the pay and could not join the union, that they had to organize an entirely new union in order to give workers a real voice. Toyota workers in Japan are forced to work under extremely harsh working conditions where health hazards or mental problems are not uncommon. On August 26, Toyota announced that it will halve production at one of its factories in Japan for over a year, but did not say anything about the fate of the workers while the factory is half shut down. So much for “mutual trust between labor and management”!

You also cannot count on your union leaders to mount an effective campaign in your defense. Again, the truth here is ugly. The UAW leadership long ago abandoned class struggle militancy for business unionism. All the union bureaucrats know how to do is beg politicians and corporations for crumbs. When the US government bailed out GM, the Obama administration and GM’s failed leadership cut a deal with the UAW that amounted to a vicious attack on the company’s diminished workforce. When it comes down to a real battle, their idea of how to resolve it is to sell out the membership by agreeing to let the auto companies cut the workers’ pay and benefits and institute mass layoffs. As the GM bankruptcy shows, these tactics do not save companies in the long run. They lead only to a dead end for rank and file workers.

What are the tactics that will work? We can learn a valuable lesson from the militant mass actions of the 1930s. In the heyday of the UAW, auto workers marched in mass picket lines and staged sit-down strikes, including six-week factory occupations at the Flint Chevrolet and Fisher Body plants in 1937. The workers’ efforts were backed by heroic acts of solidarity on the part of tens of thousands of other union members, together with their families and communities. These are the only tactics that have been proven to win major gains for workers.

The same types of mass, militant, rank-and-file worker actions are still being used successfully today by workers in France, the French Caribbean, and Latin America. In the US, millions of Latino workers, supported by the ILWU, organized a massive general strike of immigrant workers on May Day in 2006 and 2007, closing hundreds of businesses nationwide, and stopping port traffic all along the West Coast. More recently, workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago and the Stella D’oro bakery plant in New York have shown the effectiveness of plant occupations and strikes.

Where does that leave the NUMMI workers of today, and their supporters? The threatened closure of the NUMMI plant in March 2010 is still months away. That gives us the gift of time to organize an effective battle to stop it! But we must start acting soon in order to be ready when the time comes.. What is the next step? Workers must organize factory committees to coordinate an occupation of the NUMMI plant before it closes! We can have no faith in the sell-out leadership of the UAW; only a revitalized democratic rank and file movement can lead us out of the crisis! An emergency conference of representatives of rank and file workers from different areas of the plant must be convened to elect rank-and-file, democratically run mobilization committees to plan and organize the struggle for occupation.

Working class communities around the factory, and the Bay Area labor movement, must be mobilized in advance to defend the occupation. Workers will need to prepare for self-defense against the reaction of the state! The community can also help by organizing solidarity kitchens to feed the workers and their families during the occupation; raising funds to help keep workers from losing their homes; and providing other emergency assistance. Our brother and sister Toyota workers in Japan and elsewhere can also help if we call on them for solidarity and support, and even coordinate joint actions if the circumstances are right.

What should we fight for? Toyota intends to abandon the NUMMI plant because it claims it cannot make a profit there. If this is true, then Toyota should have no problem turning the plant over to the workers to run. NUMMI must be controlled and operated by its workers, without compensation to GM or Toyota! Let workers’ committees, accountable to and recallable instantly by all the workers in the plant, decide what is the best use for the plant and equipment. Open the books to give workers full access to all financial information about their company! Workers must take control of any government “bailout” funds used to shore up the company. Not a single worker should be laid off. All work should be shared among all those who can work, without loss of pay.

But only workers’ control can make this happen. A workers’ takeover of the NUMMI plant could set the stage for a movement toward workers’ control. When workers elsewhere see the NUMMI workers take the reins of their union and their factory into their own hands, they can be inspired to believe that they too can take control of their workplaces. But no form of workers’ control can remain isolated. It must be defended by a workers’ government. Ultimately, workers can band together to bring down the capitalist system – which uses their labor and the natural resources that belong to all of us to generate profit for an elite few – and the bosses’ government, which subor-dinates human rights and environmental protection to corporate profit and Wall Street greed.

Only the workers, acting together as a mighty political force, can fight capitalism and the power of the rich. Hundreds of thousands of California state workers are under the ax of the capitalist state. A massive one day general strike shut down the state universities on September 24. That was a good start, but we need more than one day of strikes.. We need to start preparing for massive assemblies of state workers, students, teachers, dock workers (ILWU), and all industrial workers, including NUMMI workers, with the support of the working class communities, to prepare a rank-and-file general strike to shut down the state of California. Only a workers’ government can ultimately save the jobs of Toyota/NUMMI workers. Only a workers’ government can and will be organized to produce goods and services for human needs, not for profit.

Down with Toyota’s plans for mass layoffs and closure of the NUMMI plant!
Jobs for all! Spread the work via a 30-hour work week at full pay!
Down with the UAW leaders’ “Buy American” chauvinism! For international workers’ unity and solidarity against American imperialism and chauvinism!
Expel the parasitic union bureaucracy and replace it with an elected and recallable committee of militant rank-and-file workers!
For workers’ solidarity between Japanese and American workers against all attacks by Toyota and the auto industry!
For workers’ control over the auto plants in the US and Japan and the rest of the world!
For expropriation without compensation of Toyota plants and the entire auto industry!
For workers’ governments in the US and Japan to carry out these tasks!
For international workers’ solidarity and worldwide socialism as the only effective means to end attacks by multinational corporations and global capitalism on workers, their families, and the environment!

Read more...

Many thanks!

I admit to having been in the dumps for many weeks.

The autoworkers I am close to pound away at me that "Change", reform, revolution, that even the weakest of rebellions for Solidarity are hopeless...that all our friends have given up and that all is lost. And I mean to tell you good folks, Obama's Auto Committee is a depressingly bad joke!

So I thank Bob Hanten, President of Solidarity Financial, and Chesterton Society Mover and Shaker, for his yeoman work in organizing the 1st Annual Minnesota Chesterton Conference, "Eaten Alive", at St. John's University yesterday for giving me new life!

Thank you Bob for bringing John Medaille to St. John's where at least 100 good folks could be inspired by him, Dale Ahlquist, Daniel Finn, Dr. Arthur Hippler, Joseph Pearce and yourself.

Most of all thank you Bob for somehow allowing me to luck out and sit in front of a brilliant kid named Adam who is studying Theology and Economics at St. John's who proved to me, along with a whole lot of other youngsters, that Solidarity and love for the Poor can never die.

I will write more about what I think this conference and its Solidarity connections might mean for autoworkers as soon as I can get caught up on a few other things.
I wanted to express my heartfelt thanks for the inspiration as early as possible!

God bless you all!

Read more...

Slave-Made Goods by Country: A List from the Department of Labor

The Department of Labor has released a new report:
The Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor. This government office has compiled a list of 122 goods from 58 countries which are produced using child labor, or slave labor, or both.

The PDF is 194 pages, but you'll only need the first 50. (The rest is basically footnotes, with one or more sources for every claim that a country uses child or slave labor for a particular good.) If you skip to page 37, you can look at the list sorted by item. Or, you can simply download this list of goods, and which countries produce them using child or slave labor. It's a short PDF. Take a look. You might even print this out, and keep it close by when you go shopping.


Source: Department of Labor

For instance, from where should one buy bricks? Apparently not Afghanistan, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, China, Ecuador, India, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Peru, Uganda, or Colombia. All but one of these countries use child labor, and six use slave labor.

Slave labor. To make bricks. In 2009. No word yet on the forecast for the next round of plagues.

From the foreword (with emphasis added):


As a nation and as members of the global community, we reject the proposition that it is acceptable to pursue economic gain through the forced labor of other human beings or the exploitation of children in the workplace. However, we are aware that these problems remain widespread in today’s global economy. Indeed, we face these problems in our own country. The International Labor Organization estimates that over 12 million persons worldwide are working in some form of forced labor or bondage and that more than 200 million children are at work, many in hazardous forms of labor. The most vulnerable persons – including women, indigenous groups, and migrants – are the most likely to fall into these exploitive situations and the current global economic crisis has only exacerbated their vulnerability.

Most Americans and most consumers in the world market would not choose to purchase goods known to be produced by exploited children or forced laborers ­ at any price. Likewise, most American companies would prefer that their global suppliers respect workers’ and children’s fundamental rights and provide their employees with working conditions that meet acceptable local standards. However, to translate these values and preferences into day­-to­-day purchasing decisions, firms and consumers need reliable information about the labor conditions under which goods are produced. In 2005, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, directing the Secretary of Labor and the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) to compile “a list of goods that ILAB has reason to believe were produced using forced labor or child labor” in order to provide consumers and firms with this type of information.

This report presents that list of goods.


Using the List


On page 44, we find that, actually, this list is not complete:

A country’s absence from the above List does not necessarily indicate that child labor and/or forced labor are not occurring in the production of goods in that country. Data can be unavailable for various reasons including that it is not collected by the government or others, or is intentionally suppressed by the government.

At first glance, this suggests that this list could be counter-productive. If I assume a country not on the list is a safe buy, reality may be that that government is just better at suppressing the reports.

However, they have managed to find data on countries under severely repressive governments, such as China. They're also clear on which countries for which they couldn't find enough data, either from the goverment itself or from watchdog groups, to make statements. These include Belarus, Gabon, Guyana, South Africa, Togo, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Also, a country with many appearances may actually be a country with better reporting in place. For instance, Argentina appears many times, but if you want to buy gravel, it doesn't seem to be a problem in Argentina. In that case, Argentina may be a safer choice, since there's clearly a great deal of reporting in that country.

It is true that avoiding an entire country will punish the employers in that country who do respect their employees. Clearly, we need more information here. On the other hand, if this is the best information we have, it may be best to act on it. The most effective pressure on these slavedrivers is likely to come two places: within their own country, and from the multinational corporate buyers. If consumers take this list seriously, both will take notice. Both will spend the extra time and money to give us more detailed information.

Another interesting fact:

ILAB’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking has also provided more than $720 million in funding for projects to combat these practices in over 80 countries.


That's a lot of money. I'd like to find a report on how that's going. But the thrust of the report remains quite distributist: we ordinary people can help end these atrocities by what we buy.

It is my strong hope that consumers, firms, governments, labor unions and other stakeholders will use this information to translate their economic power into a force for good that ultimately will eliminate exploitive child labor and forced labor.


Here's a good first step. Freeze subsidies to any corporation found purchasing from a sweatshop. Sounds obvious, doesn't it?

In the meantime, I'm putting that list in the car.

Full report: The Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.

List of goods, and which countries produce them using child or slave labor.

Read more...

  © Blogger template Werd by Ourblogtemplates.com 2009

Back to TOP