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NEWS & LETTERS, APRIL 2003
JCI strike scores gains against GM
Shreveport, La.--JCI, a key subcontractor for GM
Shreveport, went out on strike recently. They make the seats for this plant, and
the strike put us down about a day’s time. As a result of the strike, workers
at JCI got their wages up to around $18 an hour. That is important because subcontracting for GM is
another way of cutting auto workers’ wages. GM has expanded subcontracting
from parts production to whole subassemblies like seats or engines. They
would get subassemblies built while paying workers maybe $8-9 an hour, one-third
what GM pays workers inside. I think the sub-assembling is just step one of a
two-step process. If GM shut down the Shreveport plant and moved it to Mexico,
they would have bad publicity. But if later they moved production from
subcontractors to the Mexican border and even lower wages, who would know or
care? There is even a new interstate being built linking Brownsville, Texas at
the border directly to Shreveport. President Eisenhower’s defense secretary once said,
“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” They still think
that way at GM. GM may be getting short-term savings by subcontracting
from subassembly plants, but in the long run capitalism creates its own
gravediggers. We are mostly older workers in this plant, and can expect that
even if they closed it down we could eventually be transferred to another plant.
Workers at the subassembly plants, whether owned directly by GM or not, are
usually younger--and more revolutionary, because they have so much less to lose. When they do hire workers here, you have to know
somebody. When they are hiring for summer vacation relief, maybe 300 people,
workers can turn in names that have an “equal chance” to be drawn. So what are the odds that the name of the local
president’s wife was the first to be drawn--meaning she would be one of the
few that GM kept on permanently. And what are the odds that the next year the
first name drawn was the local president’s son. What did all of us in the
local give up so his wife and kid could get hired in? --GM Shreveport worker |
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