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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 24, 12 June 1950, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The contract signed between the United Auto Workers union and the General Motors Corporation represents a real victory for the GM workers, even if it is not the victory claimed by lyrical union spokesmen.
The gains for the workers are unmistakable and substantial, both in terms of wage increases and social services like medical funds and pensions. The pension provisions, while still far from adequate for the elderly worker whom industry has wrung dry and then discarded – a living standard of about $100 a month for a 65-year-old worker is a criminal pittance in a country of such extraordinary wealth – are nevertheless in advance of what has been achieved thus far in any other contract.
The terms of the sliding wage scale, on which the UAW officials have vacillated uncertainly in the past, are improved in comparison with the previous contract and represent the reaffirmation of a demand which should become part of the program of every union in the country. The idea that the wage scale should rise automatically with the rise in the cost of living is absolutely sound. We have advocated it for at least a dozen years and if is gratifying that so decisive a section of the American working class as the GM workers has been able to incorporate it into a contract.
It is true that the terms also provide for wage cuts when the cost of living goes down, which is very equitable from the point of view of the corporation, but intolerable from the point of view especially of the GM workers who have accumulated such stupendous profits, year in and year out, for this gigantic combine. However, this defect, which ties wages to the cost of living, not only in the progressive but also in the regressive sense, is compensated in the new GM contract by the provision for an annual four-cents-an-hour wage increase that is to be added to the basic scale every one of the five years that the contract runs.
This four-cents-per-hour-per-annum wage increase is a real gain. But it would be well to bear in mind that it is a gain only in comparison with the failure of other workers, in the auto industry and in other industries, to do as well. In terms of the great increase in the productivity of the GM workers, of the increase in the profit-per-worker made by the corporation, and compared with the over-all profits-after-taxes of GM – the UAW made public the most impressive detailed figures on these points – the four-cents-per-hour-per-annum wage rise is downright trivial. GM could grant twice and three times this increase without cutting very deeply into the tskin of its multi-hundred-millioned profit melons.
The GM contract is considerably better than anything obtained by most workers in recent times. It is certainly better than the outcome of the strikes in Chrysler and Bell Aircraft (Buffalo), to mention only UAW plants, although it is doubtful is GM would have granted what it did grant without the picture of these two bitterly-fought strikes before its eyes. But even this contract shows that the workers’ living standards have not yet caught up with the growth of productivity and wealth which they have made possible. The GM contract is real progress for the workers, not only for the GM workers but also for other workers, in the auto and other industries, to the extent that they are stimulated to fight for the same economic advances – and the GM contract will stimulate them to make such a fight. But it is still slow progress.
The contract means real gain, we repeat. But the price the workers have to to pay for them high and bitter. That is evident already, and it will become more evident and and oppressive later on.
We refer to the five-year term that the contract runs. That the GM corporation and, following its lead, virtually the entire capitalist press should hail the five-year provision of the contract with enthusiasm, is perfectly understandable. That the union leadership should act likewise or, at best, wave it aside as a trifle, is unpardonable.
Even if it could be demonstrated that, given the present state of the labor movement and of the policies it has followed under the present officialdom, there was no other way of getting the economic concessions incorporated into the contract without conceding the five-year clause – even in that case the attitude of the UAW official could not be excused.
The elementary obligation of a union leadership in such a situation, if it is concerned with maintaining the union consciousness, understanding, alertness and militancy of the membership, would be to explain honestly and openly that it was not a trifle it conceded to GM but a heavy price that it paid for the concessions obtained; to explain that this price is a dangerous one and will become more dangerous every year; that it is not good for the union, that it should be resisted by workers in all other unions; and that if it had to give in on this score it was only because the union is too weak to make a bitter-end fight against it right now.
This the Union leadership did not explain. And if it did quite otherwise, it is due to the fact that the weakness of the union is represented primarily by the policy – the political timidity, the fear of coming into conflict with Trumahism at home and abroad – of the leadership itself.
That the Stalinist demagogues have begun to howl against the five-year provision as a monstrosity is not very important. Let them howl! What is really monstrous is the effrontery of these people. These agents and partisans of the Stalinist regime defend a production system to which the workers are tied for life without any rights whatsoever: not the right to organize, not the right to so much as a voice in the “contract” that the employer arbitrarily and one-sidedly imposes upon them and keeps imposed by police terror, not the right to determine wages, hours ot working conditions, and of course not a glimmer of the right to strike.
But the demagogy of the Stalinists cannot and should not be used to cover or even mitigate the evil of the five-year clause. The claims made for its advantages are, at best, nonsensical.
“It will insure five years of labor-capital stability.” Preposterous! We are living in one of the most unstable periods in history. The greatest seer among us, if he had the largest crystal ball available, could not foresee the situation three years from now, let alone five. The idea that a four-cents-per-hour-per-annum wage increase will take care of the problems that may very well arise in the next five years is mad smugness which can easily prove to be disastrous. To think of planning wages five years in advance without being able to plan anything else in society, is like planning to keep warm with a box of matches in the path of an uncertain wind.
Just as bad, if not worse, will be its effect on the union as a living organism. If means that for five years the membership of the GM locals cannot discuss and decide or re-decide their relations to the corporation. What interest will the workers maintain in their union under conditions where they are excluded from reviewing their contract every year?
Democratic rights have been highly prized by the UAW from the beginning. One of the most important of these rights is the direct and active participation of the membership in the determination of the conditions under which they work for their employer, for this determination is the primary reason for the formation of unions. A democratic right that is not constantly exercised tends to die away altogether.
It is worse when a democratic right is formally put on the shelf for five years. And what five years they may prove to be! The saving grace of the contract, it is said, is that it continues to allow for negotiations and even the right to strike over production standards, a polite expression for the vicious speedup system which is notorious in GM and which the corporation undoubtedly expects to intensify as compensation for its “generosity” in the contract. This is all to the good, without a doubt, and opens the way for local initiative in the plants and the unions, for militant leadership, for maintaining the integrity of the union and the working conditions of the men.
But the saving grace is limited, because it limits – such is the tendency, at any rate – the fight against the not-at-all-altruistic corporation to local skirmishes. That is better than no fight at all against the speedup system that every GM worker has felt and protested against so vehemently, but a giant like GM can be brought to its knees not in skirmishes but in frontal battle alone.
The five-year clause is bad, it is very bad. It is not so bad from the standpoint of the growth of bureaucratization in the union, for shifting more and more power into the hands of the officials. But it is bad in every respect from the standpoint of the workers, of then- union and their future. And the sooner ways and means are devised to do away with it, the better.
The GM contract is a good next goal to shoot at for all other workers who have not yet reached such a wage and benefits level such as the GM workers will now enjoy. But anything like a five-year clause is a pair of handcuffs over our own wrists.
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