TO THE AUTO WORKERS' UNION
Harrington, Michael
This past June, at Anaheim, California, the United Automobile Workers' Union held its 26th constitutional convention. Almost a third of its membership has been left jobless as a result of the...
...Let me give you an example of what we could do...
...But that's not just going to happen...
...They always want to give us the lemons and the turkeys...
...They'll make a centralized capital-intensive technology that they can control...
...we'll fight unemployment with a little inflation...
...That's absolutely right, and I want to be up front about it...
...Just the other week, according to Business Week, General Motors came out against a proposal to finance a new synthetic fuel plant that would put a surcharge on the utility bills in the area where the new plant was to be built...
...Do you know what it took to get that prime rate to go down...
...Maybe we ought to look at what our friends in Canada and the NDP—the Democratic party—have done...
...Senator Kennedy talks about something very important...
...Let me give you a final example...
...Here is a slightly abbreviated transcript of his speech.—Ens...
...What we need is solar energy on a human scale that individuals and communities can use, a solar energy that people in Bangladesh and Tanzania can use, a solar energy that's labor-intensive, a full-employment solar energy...
...Do you want solar energy designed by Shell Oil...
...Reach out...
...When Humphrey-Hawkins was originally proposed, the government was to get down to 3 percent unemployment 18 months after the bill was passed...
...Shell Oil, Atlantic Richfield, and Exxon...
...One last work of introduction...
...Business always wants the government to nationalize a losing business...
...This convention has to commit itself to a struggle during the 1980s...
...Do you want Exxon to get the sun...
...It was 4.9 percent...
...And it doesn't stop there...
...Do you realize that now, in good times, we don't get down to what used to be called bad times...
...On May 20 one of the most prominent conservative economists in the United States had an article in the Wall Street Journal in which he said that normal unemployment in the Untied States, in good times, is now 6 to 7 percent, and that for the next two or three years we have to have an 8 to 9 percent rate in order to deal with inflation...
...Item: A conservative economist who was on Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, not a particularly radical organization, told the Joint Economic Committee two years ago that the best thing the steel management of America could do for the American economy was to resign...
...And what happens as a result of that...
...The multinational corporations that exploit them are your enemies...
...There were 1 million more unemployed people in the month of April in the United States, including some of you...
...Finally, what does all this have to do with our politics...
...More and more big corporations want not only to make crucial decisions about our lives but also to risk our money doing it...
...Not only do these boardroom people make those private decisions that ruin lives but, more often than not, they get federal money to help them do it...
...But that is the beginning of something tremendously important...
...Now you have 7 million Americans out of work, 300,000 UAW members out of work, and 18 percent inflation...
...Get the federal government to put up the money...
...Almost a third of its membership has been left jobless as a result of the recession and the poor planning of the auto corporations...
...That can't be tolerated...
...They're celebrating in the boardrooms—and some of the politicians are celebrating—that the prime rate the banks charge is going down...
...But this union is now facing a challenge that is the most profound since it was organized, back in the '30s...
...Let me give you another example of what we can do...
...I have no illusions, and I'm sure President Fraser has no illusions, about how much will be accomplished by one union person on the board of directors of Chrysler...
...It has done wonders for the entire country...
...Reach out to blacks and browns and women and the environmentalists...
...This means that we have to have at least one public energy corporation in this country...
...Do you know what the unemployment rate was in the fall of 1970, when the American voters punished Richard Nixon and the Republicans for letting unemployment go so high...
...We need a program for nothing less than the reindustrialization of the United States...
...A hundred billion dollars, which helped change the economic and social geography of the United States, and yet the public was never really in on that decision...
...He said that American steel management allowed all kinds of other countries to get a more advanced technology, that they never think of cutting prices, only raising them...
...I'll tell you what they'll do with the sun...
...And in following this out politically all you have to do is what your union has done so magnificently under Walter Reuther, Leonard Woodcock, and now Doug Fraser—engage in coalition politics...
...We have to change the real structure of American society in this regard...
...And what does GM say...
...Now it seems that the federal highway system is our next Penn Central debacle...
...I believe that the fundamental problem in this country is not simply its 371 economy but its politics, which are dominated by corporate power...
...At this convention one of the speakers was Michael Harrington, chair of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and a member of the Dissent editorial board...
...That's the choice we face today, and it's a more fundamental one than we've had in a long time...
...Do we need government subsidies in a time of recession in order to enable companies to produce more with fewer workers...
...Let's build a railroad system in the United States, in the Northeast and the Midwest, that by the year 2,000 will be as efficient as the present railroad system in Italy and in France...
...We have to democratize those decisions...
...Do you know that when a corporation runs out on you they usually get an investment tax credit wherever they go—a federal subsidy to move away and leave a community...
...We have to rethink a society in which private decision-makers in a boardroom, maximizing their profits, can destroy jobs and communities...
...I think not...
...Item: In November of last year, the New York Times, which is not exactly a radical publication, had an article entitled "American Myopia, Incorporated...
...The cover story is about robots in industry...
...That is the beginning of the proposition that the decisions made in the boardroom have to be open to the public...
...What we have to socialize in this country is something that is working and efficient and making a profit...
...They are saying that this system cannot work without 6 million, 7, 8, or 9 million people out of work...
...It has accomplished wonders, and not simply for automobile workers and farm implement workers and aerospace workers...
...American firms are too preoccupied with making short-run profits," that they don't put their money into long-term development and design and quality...
...We are entering an Orwellian world where peace is war, where slavery is freedom, a situation, indeed, where prosperity is recession...
...business won't do it unless we give them the money and let them make the decisions, and that's not the way to do it...
...We are in a crisis that is devastating entire cities and regions...
...industries, such as steel and auto, are in very deep trouble...
...Let me start by saying something that most of you know much better than I, that we are meeting here in the middle of the worst economic and social crisis in the United States in the last 50 years...
...Don't demand public ownership of moneylosing automobile plants...
...Do you realize that we put a hundred billion dollars into a highway program without thinking of what we're doing to the railroads or to mass transit...
...We are in a crisis that is not going to be resolved by one election...
...Do you know who owns the biggest solar-energy corporations in America right now...
...It cited a report by the comptroller-general of the United States, which told us that Japanese businessmen think...
...Giant price-fixing multinational corporations, armed with government subsidies in their constant pursuit of the almighty dollar, have got us into a situation where we have simultaneously rising unemployment and soaring prices...
...If there is to be a tax cut to deal with this 373 terrible recession, people will say to give the tax cut to the companies so as to increase productivity and create more jobs...
...I don't want the workers to own the lemons, and the corporations to own the productive enterprises...
...It says General Electric has figured out how to cut its assembly force in half by introducing robots, knocking out 20,000 jobs...
...We're the only advanced industrial country in the world without National Health Insurance...
...I'll give you one guess as to which corporation is the major user of that utility— General Motors...
...Either we are going to go beyond Franklin Roosevelt, beyond the New Deal and the Fair Deal and the Great Society and the New Frontier, or we are going back to Hoover...
...They chase their profits and you suffer...
...Martin Gerber [a vice-president of the UAW] said that I'm a democratic socialist...
...The fundamental answer is to challenge that corporate power, economically and politically...
...The challenges of today require us to stand up to corporate power and demand the democratization of the corporation in the economy and the politics of this society...
...Look at the current issue of Business Week...
...Please listen to me, though, even if you disagree with my political philosophy...
...q 376...
...Right now, the Japanese solar water-heater industry has got a $350 million market...
...We are in a long, profound crisis that is going to take a basic commitment from us...
...Japan has a program to get solar energy and air-conditioning into 10 million Japanese homes by 1995, which is one-fourth of the homes in Japan...
...They have brought National Health to Canada, first in Saskatchewan and then in the entire country...
...it didn't turn out to be the trucking artery that Congress said it would be...
...The conventional liberal wisdom of the last 50 years doesn't work anymore...
...Do you think we can put hundreds of thousands of people to work catching up with Italy and France...
...What I want to do today is, first of all, talk very briefly about why we are where we're at...
...I say in conclusion that this United Automobile Workers' Union is one of the finest institutions of practical idealism in the history of the United States...
...The entire industrial region of the Middle West is being devastated because of that decision...
...Reach out to the Third World, because the people in the Third World are not your enemies...
...This union has got to say to the American society that those private decisions can no longer be considered private...
...This January Jimmy Carter said that's too fast, we're going to get 5 percent unemployment seven years after the bill has been passed...
...second, talk of what we should do to get out of where we're at...
...But however we proceed technically, the point is coalition...
...Only then will social justice survive, working people overcome, and democracy prevail...
...It used to be said, "We'll fight inflation with a little unemployment...
...That is the way corporate domination of the economy hits you...
...and third, how this affects your politics...
...That was watered down to 4 percent unemployment in five years...
...Listen because we are not going to get out of this crisis by thinking as usual...
...Basic U.S...
...I hope Doug Fraser will spill the beans all over the United States about what's going on there...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
