GM Workers Need More Than a Decent Contract
The GM workers out on strike have been hit with concessions for years. They need more than a decent contract — they need a transformational agreement that puts workers’ rights before GM’s profits.
Bernie Sanders walks the picket line with striking United Auto Workers union members as they picket at the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant on September 25, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)
On the picket lines at the Detroit-Hamtramck General Motors plant, people drop by to bring doughnuts, coffee, and pizzas. Bernie Sanders’s supporters swelled the mid-morning picketing earlier this week, joining strikers from GM plants as far away as Toledo and Flint to meet up with Sanders. Alongside Ford and Chrysler workers were contingents from Wayne State University and the Metro Detroit DSA.
In brief remarks, Sanders thanked strikers for standing up to a corporation that pays its CEO $22 million but which immediately dropped workers’ health care benefits when they walked out. (After being shamed by Sanders and others, GM backtracked Thursday and reinstated workers’ health insurance.)
The strike is nearing the end of its second week, with GM and the nearly fifty thousand workers — sprawled across several states and represented by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) — still very much at odds. The fundamental conflict: GM’s unceasing drive to shave labor costs and strikers’ insistence that past concessions be reversed.
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