By Chris Fry
On October 18 tens of thousands of Italian auto workers held a nationwide strike and marched through the streets of Rome. Organized by three unions, this action was led by workers from the Italian-based conglomerate Stellantis, composed also by the French company Peugeot as well as the U.S. Chrysler Corporation.
Stellantis is the world’s fourth largest automaker. It is projected to end the year with a loss of $11.2 billion.
The worker’s militant action not only targeted the company, but also was against the right-wing Italian government. The unions are demanding incentives to allow workers to be able to afford electric cars.
This was the first such militant worker action in Rome in 20 years.
UAW lines up to confront Stellantis
On October 3, the UAW, led by President Shawn Fain, held a rally and march to the Michigan Sterling Heights Stellantis Stamping plant:
Outside the UAW Local 1264, about 400 UAW members listened to speeches from UAW leadership, including UAW President Shawn Fain, and chanted, “Keep the promise” and “Fire Tavares” (Carlos Tavares is the CEO of Stellantis, the automaker that owns the Jeep, Ram, Chrysler, Dodge and Fiat brands). They then marched about a half mile to Stellantis’ Sterling Stamping Plant.
“Are you ready to do whatever we have to do to save American jobs,” Fain asked the crowd. “This is our generation’s defining moment. Over this last year, we moved a lot of mountains, but we’ve got more mountains to move.”
The union is demanding that the company live up to the 2023 contract and reopen the Belvidere Assembly Plant, converted to an EV battery plant in Illinois and keep Dodge Durango production in Detroit.
The week before the company had announced plans for indefinite layoffs “across its footprint” and the firing of its “supplemental workers” but refused to give specifics.
It has already laid off 1,100 workers at its Warren Assembly plant.
The UAW action comes after an announcement by the union that it would hold a company-wide strike vote by Stellantis workers demanding that the company abide by the contract won last year after a six-week strike.
Of course, the auto company executives and their government minions blame Socialist China and its so-called “over capacity” for these massive job losses and broken promises.
EV crisis at capitalist auto companies.
It’s not just Stellantis that is facing this deepening crisis.
In September, the German company Volkswagen announced plans to lay off 30,000 of its 300,000 workers. VW’s software subsidiary is laying off 2,000 workers over the next two years.
Mercedes Benz is laying off workers in Seattle, Washington and London. ZF Friedrichshafen, a major parts supplier to 55 auto brands, announced it would lay off 12,000 of its workers, while another supplier, Bosch, announced that it was cutting 1,200 jobs.
Another German parts maker, Continental, announced that it was cutting “thousands of jobs worldwide”.
Swedish EV battery maker Northvolt is laying off 1,600 workers, whom it labels as “redundant”.
Honda, Volvo, Ford, and Porsche have all announced plans to slow down their production of electric vehicles.
General Motors Chairwoman, Mary Barra, told investors at a meeting in Tennessee that her company would “make money off EVs soon.” Currently, GM is losing $4 billion a year on EV production.
This unfolding crisis in the auto industry is based on two factors: 1) the global recognition that carbon emissions, about 25 percent of which come from internal combustion engines (ICEs), are an enormous danger to the earth’s population; and 2) China, due in large part to its socialist economic and social system and its social ownership of much of its production and its scientific planning, has developed the infrastructure of EV production in a vast scale capable of producing emission-free vehicles of high quality at an affordable price for working class consumers.
Currently, some 60 percent of global EV production is in China and is growing more so every year. At the end of July this year, China has constructed 10.6 million charging units.
Some 3.05 million charging stations are “public”, for use by drivers on the highway.
That contrasts with the U.S. where there are a mere 190,000 public chargers in the U.S., far fewer than needed to sustain a substantial number of EVs.
Big Oil commands the auto industry: “No electric cars!”.
In 2022, the oil and gas industry earned nearly 4 trillion dollars. If that industry was a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world.
A May 2016 article from the Guardian reveals that the oil industry spent vast sums in a multi-pronged campaign to prevent the development of electric-powered auto engines:
“Researchers discovered more than 20 such patents filed by oil companies from as early as the 1940s for technologies that could help in the development of electric cars.
“Patent records reveal oil companies actively pursued research into technologies to cut carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change from the 1960s – including early versions of the batteries now deployed to power electric cars such as the Tesla.”
Of course, the oil companies locked up these patents so that those technical developments could never be used. But that’s not all:
“And ExxonMobil funded a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting scientists and blocking government efforts to fight climate change for more than 50 years, before publicly disavowing climate denial in 2008.”
This is despite the fact that oil company scientists and executives knew since the 1970s that auto emissions are causing rapid global warming.
The 2006 award-winning documentary film, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” describes how General Motors produced thousands of an efficient, no emission electric engine powered car, the EV-1, only to recall all of them over their owners’ objection, take them to junkyards and smash them to pieces. The film exposes Big Oil as the major cause of this fiasco.
1959: Nixon debates Khruschev
In July 1959, the Soviet Union agreed to the U.S. holding the “American National Exhibition” at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. This was two years after the U.S.S.R.’s spectacular launching of Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. This had shocked the U.S. ruling class to see a socialist country taking the lead in the so-called “space race.”
Some of the Moscow exhibition displayed the works of U.S. artists, many of whom were socialists and communists.
But the U.S. government also used the exhibition as a propaganda tool to supposedly show the high living standard of the working class in the U.S. They actually assembled half a house, showcasing “home appliances, fashions, television and hi-fi sets, a model house priced to sell [to] an ‘average’ family, farm equipment, 1959 automobiles, boats, sporting equipment and a children’s playground,[10] as well as books and vinyl records.”
“There were also “four demonstration kitchens … with the RCA/Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen [being] the most futuristic. “It promised super-fast meal preparation, push-button everything, and automatic robot cleaners.] Overall, “[a]bout 450 companies made contributions to the Moscow exhibition. Sears, IBM, General Mills, Kodak, Whirlpool, Macy’s, Pepsi, General Motors, RCA, and Dixie Cup all had a presence, despite the fact that none of their products could be purchased in the Soviet Union.”
Vice-President Richard Nixon was sent to the exhibition and engaged in what was called the “kitchen debate” with Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, with each arguing the benefits of the different social systems.
Up until that time, Nixon was perceived as your typical milquetoast, corrupt, “bankers’ boy” politician. His aggressive arguments with the Soviet leader were so popular on Wall Street that, in 1960, he won the Republican nomination for president. Despite bad television debate performances, Nixon nearly won the election against Kennedy.
It must be said the Soviet workers were still recovering from successfully battling the horrendous Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R., which devastated the country and killed 27 million people. The U.S. industrial base, on the other hand, was hardly touched.
Of course, the Soviet leadership dismissed this distorted picture of the “typical” living standard of U.S. workers, particularly of the oppressed communities, with the Tass newspaper stating:
“There is no more truth in showing this as the typical home of the American worker than, say, in showing the Taj Mahal as the typical home of a Bombay textile worker.”
A “kitchen debate” with China?
Now imagine if People’s China permitted the U.S. to put on such an exhibition in Beijing or Shanghai today. The U.S. organizers would have to admit that those appliances were mostly made by Chinese workers, that most or all are available to the Chinese people. By lifting more than 850 million out of poverty in the short 75 years since the Chinese Revolution, Socialist China performed the most profound economic and social “miracle” of the modern era.
And the declining U.S. auto companies wouldn’t dare show their faces at that exhibition. Unlike Europe, the U.S. doesn’t allow China to display its vehicles at auto shows here. The Biden/Trump tariffs, now up to 100 per cent on Chinese EVs, are designed to deny workers in the U.S. affordable emissions-free vehicles, notwithstanding all the supposed “concern” from Washington over global warming.
Socialist China’s peaceful development presents a challenge to U.S. imperialist hegemony, a challenge so profound that it has motivated Wall Street and the Pentagon to send fleets of warships to stalk the Chinese coastline, to threaten imperialist war on an unimaginable scale.
But the working class here and in Europe are now engaged in an intense struggle against the auto bosses and their government minions. The accomplishments by the Chinese workers and their workers’ government represent a pathway to victory for ourselves and our families for an empowered and prosperous future.
Fry is a retired member of UAW Local 51. He worked as an assembler on the pre-final line at Chrysler’s Lynch Road Assembly in Detroit until the company closed the plant in 1980.
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