Auto Workers: Part 2: Our previous article looked at the added value wage workers create every hour we work.

In 1999, during the war against Yugoslavia, NATO bombed the Zastava auto plant. They reduced it to rubble and left the workers jobless. Last year Fiat opened its new factory on the bombed-out site.  Ready to exploit the 15 years of high unemployment there, they pay about a 1/3 of the $10.00 per hour they pay their workers in Poland.

In fact, the wages and conditions in auto, as in  any other industrial job,  are determined  more by inter-imperialist rivalry, or government manipulations of the domestic economy, than anything that happens over the management-vs-union bargaining table. Imperialist war plays a big part in impoverishing workers.

Although the bombs were dropped on Yugoslavia, the destruction was designed to "shock and awe" the whole of East and Central Europe. The region that was in part controlled by Russian imperialists was now, the war and its bombings announced, to be completely under the thumb of their German and US counterparts.  The area's low-cost workforce was now at the disposal of Western capital. Whether we like it or not, the military plays a key role in the capitalists' rate of profits!

Between 2000 and 2011 the region's auto production more than doubled. Jobs in auto rose 60% to 535,000 in 2010. Volkswagen, Fiat, Ford and General Motors led the way, investing in new plants and equipment and taking advantage of the cheaper labor. Toyota and others followed.

One in every four cars now sold in Europe is made in Eastern Europe, where the bosses pay much lower wages than in their "home" country. The cost of labor varies. In Romania, where Ford and the French firm, Renault, have plants, workers get between $6 and $7 per  hour. In Hungary at the VW-owned Audi engine plant, the world's largest, workers get about $18 per hour, close to what VW pays in Chattanooga, USA. In Germany, their counterparts get $67 per hour.

And the jobs workers in the East gained, workers in West lost. Within one year of the war in Yugoslavia, Ford announced plans to close one plant in Belgium and two in England, while GM planned to cut 6,000 jobs. All the other manufacturers made similar projections. From that year on, the wages and conditions of industrial workers in the East were used to extract concessions from all industrial workers in Western Europe.

Yet, in 1999, not one union in Western Europe even suggested organizing a strike against the NATO-led imperialist war on Yugoslavia, even as they bombed the Zastava workers out of jobs. What a pathetic failure! Still, it's a point Red Flag continually struggles to make with our co-workers: Unions play a reactionary role. While they claim to defend the quality of our lives, they actually defend the wars of their imperialist masters, refusing to attack the wage system as the source of capitalist power. We would have organized a political strike against imperialist war and against the wage system itself.

The ruling class acts as if wage labor is embraced by the masses around the world as a liberating force, lifting them out of poverty. In fact the gigantic explosion of wage labor in the last 30 years was only made possible by the brutal impoverishment of rural families in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Never in world history, from the "Enclosure Acts" in 18th-century Britain to the NAFTA agreements in Mexico in the 1990s, have the masses embraced the factory with its wage-labor system. Instead they have been driven into it through state-imposed poverty or inter-imperialist wars. Never, until today, have so many workers been pitted one against the other by the necessities of capitalist profits.

Yet never in the history of the communist revolutionary movement, has the slogan "Workers of the World, Unite!" had such resonance. Never in the history of the world has a billion-strong army of wage workers had the opportunity to reflect on their common existence and build a communist alternative to the wage system, its increasing poverty and intensified exploitation. The production and distribution of Red Flag have a key role to play.

(Future articles will look at the crisis of overproduction and the threat of China's growth to US dominance. For a final article we request letters and thoughts especially from industrial workers about the way they think auto production would look after a communist revolution. More broadly, how would transportation be organized?)

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