“Anxious autoworkers gathered outside the San Francisco office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Saturday and urged quick passage of a federal bridge loan plan for the auto industry that will help stave off potential job losses.” Autoworkers rally in support of bailout. San Francisco Chronicle, December 7, 2008The American auto industry is in crisis. Sales figures have plummeted; GM even threatens possible bankruptcy. So the Big Three have asked the government and the country for loan guarantees and other help. By now it is clear to everyone concerned that the bailout includes consequences for the workers – and indeed not pleasant ones. How does everybody really know this – even before any concrete plan is made public? Everyone knows this because of their experience of life in capitalism: they are called “dependent employees” because they are dependent on the success of the company they work for. They constantly get to feel this dependence. How many jobs exist in the auto industry, whether new hires are intended, whether overtime or part-time or closures are announced is based completely on the “course of business.” If it goes badly for the company – like now in the crisis – then it also goes badly for the workers; they lose their jobs and with it their income or (in the most favorable case) have to accept wage losses.
But its a big mistake to therefore make the Big Three one's own concern and argue for the rescue of the companies because one is dependent on them!
• For starters: the reverse equation – it goes well for the Big Three, it also goes well for its workers – has never happened anyway. That a company voluntarily raises wages during the years of fat black numbers, hires more people so that the workers who have to count every penny can work for the success of the company more comfortably – such news never comes from the company head office. Rather, it is constantly announced that one must attain the success already reached by more effort next year, and this is why wages must remain low and the number of workers lowered in any case.
• Next: it is not necessarily good for the business of GM if it sells a lot of cars. It goes well for GM if car sales bring in a lot of profit and this depends on how high expenses are in comparison to the retail price of the cars. The wages of the staff enter into this bill as a part of these costs. Their cheapening is the basis for low costs and high profits. Costs are also low if a very large number of cars can be produced with as few employees as possible. This leads to permanent changes in the workplace and to the constant increase of the work load on the workers.
• Finally: the most beautiful and cheapest cars, as well as the hard work of the employees, is worth nothing if – as now – the cars can’t be sold because all the car companies have done the same thing: all of them have increased production and have rationalized in order to produce more and more cars with fewer and fewer employees. If this has happened, the produced cars can not be discontinued, they are of course not given away, but land in the dump, and the “dear employees” are just sent on leave and then, maybe, to the Jobs Bank. Then the remaining workers may produce with even more effort more cars for even less money.
The auto workers know all this, by the way, only too well. With exactly these procedures, GM in recent years has over and over again coped with its dissatisfaction with its current business and has shot into the profit zone. The exact same thing looks somewhat different to the GM workers: with its strategy for success GM inflicts on them a kind of permanent crisis.
First, their existence is permanently insecure – nobody has control over what his workplace looks like tomorrow or whether he still actually “has” one. And secondly, everybody finds that they are always in a financial crisis in their own wallet. The wage is oriented not in the slightest towards what he needs to live, but what the company concedes to him so that it can achieve as large a profit as possible with his labor.
However, in contrast to the other economic subjects, the workers can't hope that their crisis alarms somebody and demands a bailout. A GM worker cannot go to his landlord and assert his crisis in order to lower the rent. His financial troubles count just as little there as at Wal-Mart. He can change nothing in their prices – very much in contrast to the price of his labor, which GM constantly slashes.
The crisis – a new argument for the same game
It already shows up during a “normal economic situation” how shitty it is to have to earn a living in a capitalist company: nothing is secure so that one can plan one’s life a little bit. Every wage projection is always in question, comes under review for lowering, so that the company gets its act together with its needs. And every technical advance that the company obtains takes place not to make the work shorter or so that it will be noticeably more pleasant – what is made easier in difficult physical effort is replaced with repetition and stress.
Now, however, there is a “crisis” – and the Big Three want to cope with it by putting through a new round of concessions from the staff. This takes place to lower labor costs. This proposal declares as the most natural thing in the world that a part of the necessary livelihood of the employees is simply a luxury which can and must be scrapped because the company is in trouble. The staff is treated as what it is: an appendage of the company which GM is free to dispose over.
For GM this dependence is a means: the fact that people depend on a job for their life necessities is constantly used by the company to extort them, in order to adjust the relation of wage and yield so that it is worthwhile for their production of profit. In crisis, it wants to carry out one thing above all: just like the normal survival in competition, the workers should submit to every necessary measure that comes at their expense.
Not for the first time it turns out that for the workers:
Their job is the only thing that they “have” – and precisely because of this, anything but their means
One could also learn this from the struggles of recent years in which the employees over and over again accepted tough cutbacks to protect their jobs in the long term (see Wage Reduction Made in the USA: Auto Capital Eliminates Its Social Dead Weight). This cost them a lot in previously achieved wage gains and brought longer working hours, less breaks and tougher performance requirements. The promise given in return is a quite wispy thing: if the balance of the company is not right it is indeed (like now) worth nothing – the next workers’ security- or crisis management program is waiting.
By the way: a state “bailout” for employees in the crisis already exists! It does not even have to be established or demanded: the unemployment office with its service providers anticipates all those who are not ready to grab the promised jobs from GM ...