Politics, socialism and the struggle of Delphi workers

[IndianaGreen]

Politics, socialism and the struggle of Delphi workers
By Jerry Isaacs
5 November 2005

The drive by Delphi Corporation, the largest US auto parts maker, to impose a 60 percent wage cut on its 33,000 unionized workers and gut pensions, health benefits and working conditions has brought into sharp focus the collapse of the American labor movement.

The prospect of a return to conditions of poverty and unbridled exploitation not seen since the open shop days of the 1930s is the outcome of a protracted process of bureaucratization, betrayal and ever more open union-management collaboration which has been ongoing for more than half a century. The present debacle is, in the final analysis, the product of the trade union bureaucracy’s post-war purge of socialists and its subsequent efforts to keep all anti-capitalist politics out of the unions.

The United Auto Workers, which spearheaded the struggle to establish industrial unions in the US, largely due to the efforts of socialists and left-wing militants, also spearheaded the Cold War witch-hunt that brought the CIO unions firmly under the control of an opportunist bureaucracy, subservient to the interests of American capitalism.

Today, as the consequences of that historic betrayal confront workers at Delphi—soon to be followed by workers throughout the auto industry and beyond—there is a new attempt to bar any discussion of a socialist alternative to the nationalist and pro-capitalist perspective that has led the working class into a blind alley.

At the forefront of this effort is an entire layer of professional dissidents in the UAW who have made a career of using occasional left phrases to carve out a niche for themselves in and around the bureaucracy.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/nov2005/delp-n05.shtml