General Motors accomplished what generations of left-wing activists in the factories were never able to achieve. The company actually provoked a political strike.
The recent shutdown ended — like almost all strikes — with a compromise. But for the first time, the workers who paralyzed the giant corporation for more than three weeks did so not because of wages and working conditions, but in protest of GM’s global investment strategies. These strategies determine, among other things, which plants grow and which plants die. For the first time, workers demanded a voice in the decision-making process that governs GM’s global investments.
The strike took place, workers say, because GM reneged on a key commitment to the local union at the Flint Metal Center north of Detroit, where huge presses stamp out body parts for almost all the company’s vehicles.
Three years ago, GM offered the union a trade. For decades, Flint workers have moved at a manic pace through breaks and meals, so they could leave early when they filled their production quota. GM wanted workers to stay a full eight hours on the line. In return, the company promised it would bring new machinery into the plant, making it as productive as the newest GM factories in Mexico and Brazil.
But the promised new investment never materialized, and this summer the workers walked out to force the issue. When they stopped producing parts, two dozen other plants that depended on them were forced to halt production as well.
The local union at the Flint Metal Center realizes all too well that production will gradually be transferred to plants elsewhere that have the new machinery. Without new investment, production at their facility will fall. And falling production means disappearing jobs.
To protect those jobs, workers decided they had to challenge GM’s global investment strategy. For some time now, GM has chosen to reduce its dependence on its U.S. factories and concentrate on building new facilities elsewhere. A week after the strike started in Flint, a leaked company document revealed corporate plans to increase production in Mexico from 300,000 to 600,000 vehicles by 2006.
There is sound economic reasoning behind this decision, of course. “The productivity of workers in Mexican plants is on a par with plants in the U.S.,” says University of California professor Harley Shaiken, an expert on Latin American labor. “Investors get first-world rates of productivity and a work force with a third-world standard of living.”
The strike idled 150,000 U.S., Canadian and Mexican workers, many of whom identified with the cause. Even in Mexico, where wages are only a tenth of Detroit levels, workers have been told the company can find a lower-wage place to build the next factory. In other words, GM’s investment priorities are now recognized as a central problem facing workers in every GM plant.
The strikers did not propose to bar GM investment in Mexico or other countries, or anything of that nature. They simply demanded sufficient investment in the U.S. to maintain the existing level of production. That simple demand, however, made the strike extremely political, and very difficult to settle. GM definitely does not want its workers to help decide its investment strategy.
On the other hand, workers outside the United States are wondering what took American workers so long to take up this issue. For example, on a visit to the United States last spring, Yoon Youngmo, a leader of the militant South Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), chided his counterparts here. “You make it more difficult for us to defend our jobs in Korea, because the government and the chaebols constantly tell us to look at America. ‘In America,’ they say, ‘unions don’t try to stop layoffs or job elimination, and they’re the most advanced unions in the world.’”
The KCTU has been locked in a bitter battle over exactly the issue behind the Flint strike for two years, especially since the government began to implement an austerity program based on high unemployment and vast cuts in the public budget prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank — programs strongly endorsed by the Clinton administration.
When the KCTU threatened a general strike to force the government to act, President Kim Dae Jung issued arrest warrants for 100 trade union leaders and threw the head of the KCTU in prison.
As they see how corporate investment flows to where the profits are highest, and how their countries must compete to create favorable conditions for that investment, workers like those in Flint and Seoul seem more likely than ever to seek to gain a voice over those decisions.
HUNTINGTON PARK, CALIF. — recycling has an environmentally friendly image. Reusing the basic materials of everyday life to ensure a sustainable future for the planet has almost becomes God’s work. It has also become big business, especially in places of enormous consumption and waste like Los Angeles.
Some 20 years ago, when L.A. drew up its master plan, the recycling industry hardly existed. Today industrial facilities that process glass, metal and concrete are mushrooming. But some people living in Los Angeles have a hard time seeing recycling’s green image. Their problem? They live near the plants.
“There’s always glass in the air here,” complains Mercedes Arambula, whose home in the southeastern part of the metropolis is catty-corner from a huge Container Recycling facility. Mounds of broken glass rise to twice the height of an adult in the yard. Skip loaders constantly fill open truck trailers with it.
“I’ve lived here 18 years,” she says. “My kids have asthma now, and my littlest one, who’s 1 1/2, is always sick. I won’t even let them play in the yard anymore. The trees around my house have all died anyway.”
A neighbor, Ana Cano, wipes her finger across the dusty windshield of a parked van in front of her house. It sparkles and feels grainy. “Little by little, we’re breathing this in,” she says. “I feel like my lungs are filling up with glass.”
A little farther down the main corridor of the city’s industrial heartland, Alameda Street Metal Corp. crushes used cars, trucks and metal appliances. These hunks of recycled metal travel to the other side of the Pacific, part of the burgeoning global economy of trash.
The bone-jarring thumps of the metal crusher are cracking the driveways and walls of the homes of Epifania Oliveria and Thelma Diaz. A thin film of oil coats their yards, and they say that little metal granules push up through the skin rashes of neighborhood children.
When the women complained to city authorities, they were defeated by the most local of all laws — zoning regulations. Southeast L.A. is divided into many small cities, and the plant is located in Lynwood, in an area zoned industrial, while their homes and the school across the street are in Los Angeles, zoned residential.
“The city’s message to us was that we live in the wrong place. In their eyes, we just shouldn’t be there,” Diaz says. Ana Cano got the same message when Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina came out to look at their homes. “We have to expect this, she told us, because we live in an industrial neighborhood,” Cano recalls.
Molina’s office chose not to comment. Mary Greybill, a public relations consultant for Alameda Street Metals, points to the construction of a wall separating houses from the facility. “The company has tried to accommodate its operations to meet the concerns of community residents,” she says. “We don’t operate the crusher after 4 p.m.” The company has also contributed hundreds of dollars to the Watts Century Latino Organization and donated supplies to its street-sweeping activities. Olivaria feels the actions are an effort to buy off neighborhood opposition.
Oliveria’s husband drives a lunch truck, making stops at recycling plants throughout southeast L.A. Almost everyone on his street is a factory worker. They know the plants mean jobs — but have started to ask at what price.
“We need to work,” Diaz says. “But these places have to respect the people in the community which surrounds them. The bottom line is that our community is poor, black or brown, and immigrant. Can you imagine a metal recycler in Santa Monica or Hollywood?”
Recycling is exempted from many pollution regulations because it is viewed as environmentally positive. Recyclers do not need discharge permits for pollutants, for instance, nor are they covered by the land-use regulations in the county master plan. “Regulations are simply not applied to potentially harmful businesses which are located in low-income communities of color, particularly in southeast Los Angeles,” says Carlos Porras, Southern California director of Communities for a Better Environment.
Porras’ organization, which has worked with neighbors of the recycling plants since 1993, cut its teeth on a gritty, four-year campaign of neighborhood opposition to Aggregate Recycling Systems, a concrete recycler in the Huntington Park area of Los Angeles. The company’s refusal to address the concerns hardened neighborhood attitudes. Activism by local residents made the recycler a political leper at city hall, and the city council finally declared the facility a public nuisance. A mountain of discarded concrete still overshadows the neighborhood, but residents have stopped the operation completely.
“The city council thought this concrete recycling business would be the first of many such clean and green facilities,” says Dean Hickman, who has fought against the concrete mountain from the beginning. “But we not only organized our own neighborhood in response, now we’re going to the neighborhoods around other plants and helping them get organized as well.”
Maybe the greenest thing produced by proliferating recyclers will be a new kind of movement for environmental justice.
OAKLAND, Calif. — John Cortez isn’t a kid anymore. So why is he still trying to survive on the same part-time job that he got when he was young and single?
Because he works at United Parcel Service.
Cortez got a job at the same place thousands of young people think of, especially when they’re going to school and trying to earn a living at the same time. The word has been out for years — if you can hook a job at UPS, you can put yourself through school, earn a union wage and get benefits. And with no dependents, you can live on that part-time wage.
But young people grow older. They get married and start families. They need a stable life and a paycheck that can pay the bills.
That’s the fuel behind the strike at UPS.
“I’ve been working 26 to 28 hours a week for years,” Cortez explains. “It’s really hard now. I have a wife and two kids. It’s just not enough hours to pay the bills. My wife and I both work. It’s gotten to be more than we can tolerate.”
Before the strike started, the waiting line to get a full-time job was still five years long. Cortez’s oldest child will be in middle school before he gets there. “I can’t wait five years. I need a change right now,” he explains when asked why he went out on strike.
That full-time position would not only increase his hours. It would give him a substantial raise. Cortez makes $11.60 per hour as a part-timer. The base wage for part-timers — who constitute almost 60 percent of UPS’s work force — has stayed at $8 per hour for the past 15 years. A full-time driver can make over $20.
Many part-timers at UPS don’t really work part time at all. Scott Biales puts in a week that regularly runs 48 to 50 hours. Sometimes he replaces a truck driver for a few hours, and he gets a higher wage when he does. But mostly, he’s working the original part-time position in the terminal into which he was hired years ago. And still at a part-time wage.
Part-time workers provide UPS with many advantages. “They’re usually young people, and they work them to death for those four hours. Then they just bring in more,” according to Chuck Mack, secretary-treasurer of Oakland’s Teamsters Local 70. The union tried to hold down the workload with a mid-contract strike two years ago, which sought to limit to 70 pounds the weight of packages workers were required to lift. Nevertheless, the present contract took the limit to 150 pounds, and UPS now wants the right to increase it even further at any time, with no negotiations.
“In a lot of terminals, two-thirds or even three-quarters of the employees are part-timers,” Mack says. They make up 80 percent of new hires since 1993. The lower-tier wages the company pays them helped generate a $1 billion profit for UPS last year.
That gives the company a big reason for asking President Clinton to intervene to stop the strike, instead of sitting down with the union and making some compromises. UPS pooh-poohs the part-timers’ complaints. “The part-time issue is just a smoke screen,” according to Kristi Wolfgang, UPS’s spokeswoman in Atlanta, who said the real issue was the union’s refusal to allow the company to switch to a new pension plan that isn’t run by the Teamsters.
But union activists say UPS is asking for concessions that would make the problem of part-timers even worse. The company wants to subcontract out the jobs of feeder drivers, who drive between terminals. These jobs are promotions for the delivery drivers in the familiar brown trucks, and are held by the most senior workers. If feeder driver jobs are contracted out, delivery drivers won’t move up into them, so there won’t be openings for part-timers in the terminals. That would make the waiting line for Cortez and Biales even longer.
Some 185,000 Teamster members are on strike, and the union, riven by internal discord over reforms, has closed ranks behind them. On the picket lines, strikers seem energetic and confident, knowing they have the company shut down tight. At the big UPS terminal near the Oakland airport, the largest hub in Northern California, they break all the stereotypes about union members. Picketers’ average age is in the 20s. African-Americans rub shoulders with whites, Latinos with Asians. The loudest picketers are women.
Mack himself ran unsuccessfully against President Ron Carey’s slate last year. Now, however, “I agree totally with the stand Carey has taken,” he says. “Politics is a luxury when we’ve got the future of our members at stake.”
