5-25-06, 11:15 am

PA: First, tell us a little about your self and your history in the labor movement.

LM: Well, I’ve worked at the Chrysler plant here in St. Louis for almost 42 years. It has about 3,500 UAW members. I currently hold the position of shop chair of UAW Local 110, and have been involved in the community for most of those 42 years.

I’ve organized community-labor coalitions and fought for African Americans to be included in various industries here in St. Louis. I helped the first African American in Missouri get elected to Congress back in the 1960s. I’ve worked on local political campaigns. I’m a founding member of the St. Louis area Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) and have served as its president for over 25 years.

I’ve worked on health care campaigns, tenants rights organizing and the Free South Africa movement. During the Vietnam war I was very active in the peace movement. I was active in the farmworkers’ movements, going all the way back to the grape boycotts. I’ve been all over the country supporting workers’ rights to organize.

PA. Things have changed a lot over the years. How does the Bush administration and its policies compare to other previous administrations?

LM: First, and this shouldn’t surprise anyone, the Bush administration doesn’t care about working-class people. Its policies support the wealthy, those who already have money. Its policies are designed to weaken the working class. And we can see this in a lot of ways: various trade policies that erode unions in this country, the appointment of antiunion, anti-worker politicians to government posts, tax breaks for the rich, among other things.

The Bush administration doesn’t make policy with workers in mind. They do things and make decisions that devastate communities and workers. They make decisions without regard to human suffering. The Bush administration is continuing those policies of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, while working-class people suffer.
The US is a very wealthy country, the wealthiest in the world. But we have people here that don’t have a roof over their head, don’t have health care, can’t find a job, don’t have basic education. We’re the wealthiest country in the world and that’s the way things are done here.

PA: Recently Ford announced its intention to layoff 30,000 employees by 2008. The Hazelwood plant here in Missouri, which employs close to 2,000 people, is closing soon. Ford says it’s a “capacity problem.” But when the layoffs were announced, Ford’s stock jumped up. Can you explain this?

LM: Bad news for workers is good news for some people. When companies layoff people it’s good for investors. It’s kind of hard to figure out. Why would stocks go up when we impoverish workers and devastate communities?

In a market economy – and we see this over and over again, and it really illustrates a problem of the market, a market problem, not a worker problem – workers pay the price for problems in the market.

This is a larger, systemic problem. The auto industry as we know it is changing. We’re seeing a shift. People are buying cars. There’s no shortage of consumers buying cars. More cars are being sold than ever before. The question is, who are consumers buying cars from? And are those cars made by union members, in a union shop, with union benefits, health care, pension, seniority? So while union workers at Ford are getting layoffs, non-union Toyota is building new plants. The automotive industry is growing at the expense of the unionized work force.

One of the biggest expenses the auto industry faces is the cost of health care. GM spent almost $6 billion on health care. In 2004 they spent $5.2 billion. Ford spent $3 billion. Chrysler spent $1.9 billion. Health care in this country is based on who you work for. How well they do in the market has a big impact on your health care benefits. Fortunately, the UAW has negotiated some of the best health care packages in the world.

Now with the non-union competition weakening the UAW, health care is becoming even harder to get. Bush could pick up the tab for health care. That would free-up capital for technology and enable US car manufacturers to continue business and provide jobs. He ain’t going to do that though. The big three will eventually have to take on the health care lobby. It’s clear that Toyota doesn’t have the health care policies. They don’t have retirees. They haven’t been in business long enough to have half a million retirees.

This shift has to be a cause for alarm. It is affecting the organized labor movement in more ways than just the obvious. There was a time when most of the cars sold in this country were union made, but now we have seen a shift. More non-union cars are sold now than union made cars. Right now, there are just as many non-union auto workers as there are union auto workers. And the trend is towards more non-union.

Most of the new auto plants being built are notoriously anti-union. They build plants in areas less likely to have union support. They recruit heavily against the union. They work at it. They make it into a science. Every move they make is part of a plan to keep the union out. The decision on where to locate, how the plant is built, what’s in the plant, its all part of an anti-union plan. They don’t just oppose the union one day and forget about it the next.

As a result of anti-union policies and as the market share shifts away from the big three – GM, Ford and Chrysler – union jobs decrease. Toyota is expected to supplant GM as the number one auto manufacturer sometime this year. So people are still buying cars, but they are shifting from GM, Ford and Chrysler – and Chrysler is doing better than the others – to non-union cars. This is something we couldn’t have imagined 15 or 20 years ago.

The question is, what affect will this shift have on the working class here? What affect will it have politically? What affect can a weakened organized labor movement have on the direction of our country? What affect will it have in a civil rights, human rights capacity? If there were no unions around to support the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, where would that movement be?

The UAW has gone from 1.5 million members in 1979- 80 to about 500,000 active members today. We’ve lost about one million members. And we’re still on the slide. So we’ve got big problems. The Toyotas, Nissans and Hondas need to be organized. That’s the challenge that faces the UAW.

In my opinion, we aren’t fully utilizing all of our forces. Most new plants are being built in the south. The state of Alabama is going to look like Michigan soon. If you want to organize in the south, you have to build coalitions. The Black community should be a key focus in organizing efforts in the south. They are our natural allies. But I don’t think we are fully utilizing those forces. But they should be engaged in a major, national effort to organize non-union plants. We’ve dropped the ball.

PA: What about the crisis at Delphi?

LM: The unionized parts industry has been weakened by outsourcing over the years. We saw the start of this 20 years ago when parts plants first started closing and moving to southern states. This set off a competition. We call it a race to the bottom now. But generally speaking, parts plants compete for bids. Plants that have moved to non-union areas have an unfair bid advantage. They can under bid union plants because their costs are lower. They don’t provide health care, pensions or union wages, which all costs money.

As non-union parts plants spring up they produce parts for GM, Chrysler and Ford. The result: the market for Delphi parts shrinks. Union members get layoffs. You got non-union parts companies all over the place, who are in the game, manufacturing parts much cheaper because they can exploit workers and communities.

It started with the parts suppliers and now it is in the assembly plants. There wasn’t as much alarm as there should have been. I can remember going to a UAW convention 20 years ago when members from the parts division were marching out side trying to warn us about this. They were loosing jobs then. Companies were leaving places like Ohio and Michigan and going to Arkansas and Alabama. The assembly plants were secure then. But now the assembly plants are no longer secure. The technology has improved so much that it costs less to build new plants than to update old plants. It started as suppliers, now its the whole industry. So we have major challenges. PA: Internationally, how are US unions, especially the UAW, dealing with the increasingly global economy where plants are closed just to be opened somewhere else where workers are paid a fraction of what union workers here are paid?

LM: The UAW has always maintained some kind or relationship with auto workers in other counties. I’ve been to every UAW convention as a delegate since 1977, and we’ve always had some international representative from other unions. We’ve always had those relationships, but we haven’t had the unified, collective power of those organizations. We haven’t had a unified, international strategy or an international show of force. To deal with the problems that workers are facing now, that’s what we need.

Unions all over the world should send representatives to other countries to see how those workers are being treated and to find ways for our unions to work together.

In my opinion, the unions in the auto industry need to call a world summit, or some sort of industrial unions’ summit. Auto workers in Mexico have a lot in common with auto workers here. Auto workers in Korea, Japan, France, Brazil, Russia, elsewhere need to be working together more. We have to face these problems together. Capitalism is global in nature. Labor has to be global. We aren’t going to solve all of our problems here.

PA: Is the industrial union organizing model loosing its relevancy now that we are moving into a service and information based economy?

LM: People are saying, “we will no longer be builders, others will build for us.” It’s kind of scary. If we are able to purchase all of our needs from others, if we are becoming a service based society, if all of that is true (and I’m not sure it is), sooner or later we won’t be able to build cars. We won’t know how to do anything.

We should help other countries build up their infrastructure and industrial base so that they can benefit from it, not so that multinational corporations can make more money. We need to help others so that they can develop their own industry, their own economy. And we have to organize against those who take the wealth and concentrate it into the hands of the few. Multinational corporations only care about making more money.

All countries should have an industrial base. There is no question about that. There is enough of a need here for workers here to build and stay busy for years and years. Our infrastructure, our streets, highways, buildings, schools, hospitals, are all crumbling. We have to rebuild New Orleans. If Katrina has taught us anything, it’s that our infrastructure has been neglected. There is plenty of industrial work to do. The Bush administration has other priorities though.

As far as organizing the service sector; it is easier to organize in the service sector. Their jobs aren’t being shipped to other places. We need to engage in a worldwide fight to organize the industrial sector though. I’m not against organizing the service sector. We’ve got unions that are structured for that. But more and more we see industrial unions organizing in the service sector. The industrial union organizing model is still relevant today. There are still plenty of industrial jobs in need of organizing. But we have a long way to go.