Midwest Workers Bring Bus Caravan And Campaign To D.C.
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
LANSING, Mich. (PAI)--Shuttered auto plants. Reeling car companies. A future with unemployment compensation -- and not much else. And a campaign for Congress to do something.
That’s the message busloads of workers from the industrial Midwest brought to D.C. on May 19, for a “teach-in” for lawmakers on auto industry woes, and its impact.
The week-long Drive America Forward caravan, led by Steelworkers President Leo Gerard and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, started from Lansing, Mich. -- whose mayor joined in -- and wound through Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania on its way to D.C. Its emphasis was on reviving and restoring the domestic auto industry which, with its suppliers and dealers, accounts for more than 7 million U.S. jobs.
“I don’t want to rob my kids of the future I was able to have,” one worker said when the group met in the U.S. Capitol’s basement during a break in their lobbying.
The group brought a 7-part plan to restore the industry, including stimulating domestic demand for new cars by “cash-for-clunkers,” and requiring that U.S. taxpayer dollars go to GM and Chrysler for “domestic jobs investment and innovation” without off-shoring of U.S. auto jobs. There are persistent reports that GM in particular would take the U.S. money and then expand operations in China, to export cars to the U.S.
Their plan also calls for a joint government-auto industry effort on “cooperative innovation and R&D” for “clean cars,” and changing health care policy “to eliminate structural problems” -- such as high costs for retiree health care -- for U.S. auto makers.
And they demand a trade policy that promotes U.S. car exports, particularly to countries such as South Korea and Japan that have thrown up trade barriers to U.S. vehicles.
“People across the nation are terrified about the future of their families and their communities,” Gerard said, opening the Capitol Hill teach-in.
“Laid-off Moms and Dads in Fort Wayne, Ind., desperately want to go back to work making auto parts. Some are struggling to feed their kids and they’re angry that their tax dollars could be use to export jobs,” he added.
And it isn’t just auto workers -- or parts workers or dealership employees -- hit by the automakers’ woes, Gerard noted. “In Granite City, Ill., a 4th-generation restaurant owner agonized over the thought he may not be able to hand down his diner to his baby girl because local plant closings have hurt his business,” the USW chief explained.
The bus tour was only one part of the pro-auto mobilization. Organizers, including the pro-worker Alliance for American Manufacturing, said there were events in 34 cities in 11 states in the week leading up to the congressional visit.
The group got a mostly favorable reaction from lawmakers they met. The meetings and the caravan occurred just days before GM, the biggest and most troubled of the U.S.-based auto makers, reached a tentative contract modification with the United Auto Workers.
Details of that pact, reached May 21, were not released, pending a vote on it by the UAW’s remaining members at GM. But news reports said it includes “changes in labor costs and in the company’s contributions” to retiree health care.
The UAW and GM had tangled over how the company would pay for its share of retiree health care, which is scheduled to be turned over to the union next year. The UAW wanted cash, while GM offered stock.
The bus tour may not be the workers’ last protest, Gerard promised. Answering questions at the end, he declared: “Our voices have to be loud and they have to be strong. And if we can’t explain this crisis this way, we’ll have to use the options of the civil rights and womens’ rights movements -- expressing our outrage. Only then will we get a change in direction.
“These presentations,” including a CD and media kits, “will go to every USW local, so we can demand meetings with senators and representatives” on the industry’s future, Gerard added.
And Gerard, speaking for the workers on the buses and in the auto, tire, rubber steel and glass industries -- many of whom his union represents -- drew a contrast between what lawmakers did for bankers and what they didn’t do for workers tossed out of jobs by Wall Street’s financial games and subsequent crash.
“This isn’t about union and non-union. If you (Congress) paid as much attention to the industrial economy as you did to AIG,” the insurance-financial behemoth that has received billions of taxpayer dollars, “then we wouldn’t be in this toilet of an economy,” he declared.