General Motors cuts 1,000 salaried jobs, while UAW covers up its role with bogus ‘Keep the Promise’ campaign

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Shift change at the Detroit Assembly Complex-Mack

In the wake of mass layoffs at Boeing and automaker Stellantis, General Motors said Thursday it is laying off 1,000 mostly white-collar workers from its global operations, with most of the cuts in the United States.

The largest number of cuts will come at the General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Michigan, where 507 salaried workers, along with some hourly workers represented by the United Auto Workers, are losing their jobs. Some of the cuts were the result of management’s new ranking system, which targets workers “who don’t meet expectations” for layoffs.

In August, GM eliminated nearly 1,500 from its software division globally. Total included 634 at Warren Tech Center.

In announcing the layoffs, management issued its standard justification, citing market pressures and a hypocritical “thank you” to those cut off for their help enriching the corporate oligarchs. “To win in this competitive market, we must optimize for speed and excellence. This includes working with efficiency, ensuring we have the right team structure and focusing on our highest priorities as a company.” It further added, “We are grateful to those who helped create a strong foundation that positions GM to lead the industry going forward.”

GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson has said the cuts are part of a drive to cut costs to boost profitability, including for its money-losing electric vehicle business.

The company said that in addition to the cuts in Warren, it was shutting down its Yuma Desert Proving Grounds in Arizona and permanently closing its durability, corrosion and demolition departments at its Milford Proving Grounds in Michigan.

The cuts also come in the wake of another 1,100 layoffs at the Jeep complex in Toledo, as well as 400 layoffs at Universal Logistics’ parts sequencing facility in Detroit. Many workers at the logistics facility had previously worked at the Jeep factory in Toledo.

Recent layoffs and cutbacks have also taken place at the Indiana Transmission plant in Kokomo, Indiana, and other Detroit-area plants, including at Warren Truck, the Detroit Assembly Complex-Mack and the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant. The escalating carnage for jobs aims to shift the costs of the transition to electric vehicles onto the shoulders of workers.

Ford Motor recently shut down a shift at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Complex in Dearborn, Michigan, until the end of the year. The facility builds the F-150 electric light truck.

Auto job cuts are escalating worldwide as employers try to cut costs in the electric car transition.

The latest cuts include 9,000 jobs from Nissan, Volkswagen’s planned closure of three plants in Germany along with 20 percent wage cuts and 4,500 redundancies from Audi. Stellantis has previously threatened mass job cuts in Italy. Last week, Sumitomo Rubber announced the closing of its tire plant in Tonawanda, New York, at a cost of 1,550 jobs.

The job massacre has a wider impact. Economists estimate that every auto assembly job supports 10 jobs in the broader economy. Workers at the Toledo Supplier Park next to the Jeep plant face layoffs in January, including more than 200 workers at Mobis, a company that makes chassis and power units for Stellantis, and KUKA Toledo Production Operations, which is cutting 160 jobs.

The global nature of the cuts requires an internationally unified response from the working class. Last week, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) issued a call for “a global campaign against cutbacks in the automotive and other industries.”

The IWA-RFC declared that they “reject the capitalists’ ‘right’ to control production to maximize profits by driving workers into the ground. Instead, we fight to realize the social rights of the working class through workers’ control of production, through the transformation of giant corporations into public utilities.”

“This campaign must be organized as a revolt against the labor bureaucracy in each country, which helps its ‘own’ capitalists compete against foreign rivals by enforcing layoffs and wage cuts,” the statement continued. “In every country the trade unions are run as bureaucratic dictatorships, totally uncontrolled by the workers within them. The apparatus must be abolished and power transferred to the rank and file.”

This has been shown by the responses of the United Auto Workers, who have not even acknowledged the cuts at GM as of this writing. Instead of a genuine fight to defend jobs, the UAW has promoted its bogus “Keep the Promise” campaign, based on empty threats to strike over alleged contract violations by Stellanti, including the company’s delay in reopening the shuttered Belvidere assembly plant, Illinois.

The campaign launched back in August, despite much outrage, has not resulted in any actual job action. UAW President Shawn Fain suffered a humiliating vote of no confidence last month when Stellantis workers at Kokomo Casting in Indiana, Fain’s home plant, failed to authorize a strike in a vote held last month by the local union in connection with the “Keep the Promise ” campaign.

On Thursday, Kevin Gotinsky, head of the UAW Stellantis division, issued a tepid statement about the latest rash of automatic layoffs, calling them “unacceptable” and vowing to fight them where “they violate our contract.”

The UAW letter argues that the cuts were the result of poor management and trade policies, not the fundamental class antagonism between workers and employers under capitalism. “We’re also taking steps to make sure jobs stop leaving the country under broken federal trade agreements, and we’re going to have to fight on multiple fronts to save this company from itself. Many of us have experienced situations in the past where leaders passively while the company ran roughshod over our contracts and our livelihood. We won’t let that happen.”

A veteran worker at Warren Truck explained the bogus nature of the so-called job guarantees in the “historic” 2023 contract. There were “unpublished letters” between the UAW and management, he said. “They make deals with the company that the membership wouldn’t know about.”

He pointed out that the investment commitment letters all have management clauses that say “that work coming in is contingent or based on the market. They shouldn’t allow that kind of language. What is a ‘decline’ in the market? They can define it however they want.” An arbitrator could then “override the contract,” he stressed.

In the wake of the Democratic Party’s election debacle that resulted in Trump’s victory, the UAW has signaled its willingness to work with the fascist president-elect, despite previous mutual dismissals.

Trump has said Fain should be “fired” and called him a “stupid person.” Last month, Fain said Trump was “a billionaire who has never worked a real job in his life,” and called the president-elect “a scab.”

But the UAW has not ruled out working with the Trump administration on the basis of their shared agenda of rabid American nationalism and support for trade wars against foreign rivals of American capitalism.

In a letter after Trump’s election, Fain said the union would work with any politician to bring back “American jobs,” including renegotiating the “broken USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) trade agreement.” Under Trump’s previous administration, the UAW worked and other unions closely with the White House to extract concessions from Mexico that were favorable to American big business.

A worker at the Detroit Assembly-Mack plant described the situation to World Socialist Web Site. “Another 50 workers have just been laid off. All third shift workers were laid off, all temporary part-timers were fired, and now a total of 400 full-time employees have lost their jobs.

“They’ve gotten rid of everybody with 2021 seniority, and they’re starting to go after the guys who were hired in 2020. The layoffs are very upsetting. These guys have kids and they don’t know what’s going to happen to them. They’re relieved that they get health insurance for a year, but no other job they find will pay half of what they got here.

“The furloughed get a maximum of $362 a week in unemployment and SUB (supplemental unemployment benefit from the company) pays $700. But many people run into problems when they file a claim on the state’s call-up system. And if you don’t get an unemployment check, you won’t get SUB salary either.

“If MARVIN (Michigan Automated Response Voice Interactive Network) doesn’t like you, you go from a regular paycheck at Stellantis to zero income. Even if you get the maximum, a lot of guys were lured into the car leasing program.”

He explained that under the program, the company pays for insurance and repairs, but now the workers are “anywhere from $570 to $1,050 a month on the lease and now they’re out of a job.”

He added that even those who work see a lot taken out of their paychecks in taxes, “to pay for all the bombs and wars.”

The Mack worker continued: “There’s a lot of chaos in the plants now. We’re back on a nine-hour shift, but no one knows what will happen next. They are cutting jobs at the Universal Logistics facility near our factory. After telling workers that last year’s contract was “historic” and would save jobs, no one has any confidence in Fain, who is a real, professional crust.”

Veteran Warren Truck worker said, “They are being deliberately vague (about the status of laid off workers) to create uncertainty for people. A lot of good trades that were laid off applied to GM and Ford and got called up, some retired and went to GM .

“Some goes to different facilities. As far as progression and part-time, they keep them in limbo. Take them back for a week and then put them away.

“Uncertainty is a tactic they use to force people to stop or make a purchase. Then they turn around and ramp up again. It’s because electric vehicles need fewer people to build a car. But it seems like they could use them elsewhere in the company.”

He said workers would be notified of openings at other facilities based on seniority. “According to the agreement, they cannot hire anyone off the street.” He explained that the company used various means to undermine workers’ right to transfer. “They will deliberately call you out of your market area, somewhere far away like St. Louis, you can only say no a couple of times. They have all kinds of dirty tricks. They get fancy with the language, they say 50 miles, that’s as the crow flies. It is what they use to prevent you from getting a reassignment. It was negotiated by the old administration that took the bribes, but that was not changed in this contract.”

We call on workers to build and expand the network of rank-and-file committees organized independently of the pro-business UAW apparatus. Workers interested in building and joining rank-and-file committees or sharing information about conditions at your workplace should contact the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter.

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General Motors cuts 1,000 salaried jobs, while UAW covers up its role with bogus ‘Keep the Promise’ campaign

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