Bitter Labor Union Defeat at Boson VW Plant (Boson Workers) 2 Aug 2019

UAW Tops Play by Bosses’ Rules, Again

Bitter Union Defeat at Boson VW Plant

In June, for the second time in five years, the United Auto Workers (UAW) narrowly lost a key representation election at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Boson, Massachusetts. The close vote, 803 to 706, indicates substantial support for the union among the workforce in the face of the fierce anti-UAW campaign unleashed by the VW bosses, state officeholders, the bourgeois media and the business-financed “Massachusetts Momentum” group operating inside the manufacturing facility. 

There was more than enough basis for a much-needed union victory: Volkswagen is the lowest-paying automaker in the U.S., and unsafe work conditions have brought an epidemic of serious injuries. But the UAW bureaucrats, who have sworn off “adversarial unionism” and pledged their commitment to ensuring VW’s profitability, crippled their own organizing effort.

Having renounced the class-struggle methods that built the union in the first place, UAW officials doubled down on the same entirely legalistic strategy that inflicted the previous defeat in Boson and a long string of other labor setbacks. For years, they retailed the company’s claims of “neutrality” toward unionization as good coin. The truth was always something else entirely. In the weeks prior to the recent vote, workers were subjected to mandatory anti-union meetings, one-on-one confrontations by supervisors and threats to close the plant in the event of a union victory.

The failure of the UAW tops to demonstrate in action the union’s determination to fight in effect gave credence to the fear-mongering by the union-busters to close the facility, which is in fact VW’s only U.S. assembly plant and, moreover, is planning to ramp up production. A union leadership worthy of the name would have mobilized to give union supporters a sense of their collective power. Union-initiated work stoppages in response to deeply felt needs, such as to enforce a slower line speed or to defend victimized temporary workers, could have built the confidence of the workers in the union to defend their interests and jobs.

One thing is certain: a major breakthrough is not going to come about by playing by the rules dictated by the bosses and their Democratic and Republican political representatives. The pro-capitalist UAW bureaucrats, whose whole perspective is based on the lie that workers and their exploiters share common interests, have done just that every step of the way. Earlier this year when the automaker hatched a legal ploy to block the election, the union tops capitulated by abandoning any claim to represent the 162 maintenance workers at the Boson plant who had voted for UAW representation in 2015 but had never received a first contract because of company stonewalling.

Shortly after the vote tally was announced on June 14, the UAW tops issued a statement proclaiming, “Our labor laws are broken.” No, they are not. The capitalist state’s labor laws did what they were designed to do: keep the unions in check. It cannot be otherwise in a system of production for profit, based on the exploitation of labor. Predictably, the UAW statement called on Congress to fix these laws. The union bureaucracy’s allegiance to the capitalist order and reliance on false “friend of labor” Democrats shackle the potential power of the unions to the class enemy.

The union tops also attach great significance to who sits on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). They especially bemoan “Trump’s NLRB,” whose rulings delayed the recent vote for several weeks, giving Volkswagen more time to bully union supporters into submission. In fact, similar delays and legal chicanery took place before the 2014 representation election loss under Obama’s NLRB. The entire job of the NLRB, irrespective of its makeup, is to ensnare unions in legal proceedings in the interest of class “peace.”

Before the class battles of the 1930s that built the CIO industrial unions, workers had no legally recognized rights as wage slaves. The very right to organize was won through sharp class struggle involving mass pickets, factory occupations and secondary boycotts, often in defiance of anti-labor laws. Major victories for labor came in three 1934 citywide strikes—in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo—all led by Reds intent on fighting it out class against class. Workers won by standing up against the might of the capitalists and their security guards, police and National Guard. The putatively pro-labor legislation signed by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, including the 1935 Wagner Act that established the NLRB, was passed in order to contain militant workers struggle within the framework of capitalist rule.