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autoworkers
Thousands of Autoworkers Protest in Brussels Amid Likely Audi Layoffs
"Their anger is very legitimate, very understandable, especially since Audi is not very clear on its plans," a local employment minister said.
Sep 16, 2024
Thousands of autoworkers protested in Brussels on Monday following recent news that Audi, a subsidiary of the German automaker Volkswagen, would phase out production at its plant there, which is expected to mean layoffs for its roughly 3,000 employees by the end of 2025.
The phase-out announcement led to a labor dispute that's shuttered the plant for the last two weeks, with some employees forming an encampment protest outside. The plant is expected to resume operations on Tuesday even though the core issues underlying the labor dispute, which some unions have characterized as a lockout by management, haven't been resolved.
Between 5,500 and 11,000 demonstrators marched toward the European Parliament on Monday, bringing "chaos" to Brussels, where public transport was largely shut down. Unions not directly affected by the Audi plant's likely closure participated in solidarity.
"Their anger is very legitimate, very understandable, especially since Audi is not very clear on its plans," Bernard Clerfayt, a local employment minister, toldAFP.
Charlie Le Paige of Belgium's worker's party, Parti du Travail de Belgique, wrote on social media that there were "lots and lots of people in the streets of Brussels in support of Audi workers and subcontractors."
Le Paige said that the company was treating employees as disposable while distributing huge amounts of money to shareholders, and declared that "workers are not adjustment variables!"
Beaucoup beaucoup de monde dans les rues de Bruxelles en soutien aux travailleurs et aux sous-traitants d'#Audi 🔥 Le groupe VW-Audi a distribué près de 12 milliards de dividendes l'année passée, les travailleurs ne sont pas des variables ajustement! pic.twitter.com/aUEgbCNZsl
— Charlie Le Paige (@charlielepaige) September 16, 2024
The state-of-the-art Audi plant in southern Brussels produces the Q8 e-Tron, an electric sport utility vehicle. Audi received about 27 million euros ($30 million) in public funding to retrain workers when it converted to electric vehicle production.
Audi announced in July that it was considering discontinuing production of the commercially unsuccessful Q8 e-Tron and closing the Brussels plant, and said earlier this month that it still hadn't found an alternative vehicle that it could produce there.
The following day, September 4, the plant's workers "downed tools" and set up protest camps on the premises, according toWorld Socialist Web Site.
On September 6, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, a leading U.S. unionist, visited the plant in solidarity with the workers there.
About 1,500 Audi workers at the plant face the prospect of layoffs as early as next month, another 1,100 by May, and the remainder by the end of 2025. There are also many hundreds of subcontractor workers that would be impacted by a closure, unions have said.
Last week, workers took about 200 car keys from vehicles at the plant as an act of protest, prompting warnings of legal action by the company. The workers later returned the keys to try to facilitate discussions with management.
The plant's likely closure is seen as part of E.V. failures at Volkswagen and European carmakers more generally, prompting calls for the European Union to invest in and protect the industry. Audi reportedly plans to make the successor to the Q8 e-Tron in Mexico.
Many of the demonstrators on Monday spoke harshly about E.U. policy.
"We also want to send a strong signal to European authorities, which are making things difficult for Belgian industry, but also for European industry," Patrick Van Belle, a leading union official at Audi Brussels, toldReuters, in explaining the reasons for Monday's demonstration. "The manufacturing industry is mainly migrating away from our countries."
Volkswagen's layoffs may in fact extend beyond Belgium. The company made the surprising announcement earlier this month that it may shutter factories in Germany, drawing fierce opposition from unions there. The closures would be the first in Germany in the company's 87-year history.
Former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi last week issued a report, commissioned by the E.U., calling for stronger industrial policy and a degree of trade protectionism, including in the auto industry, which is struggling to compete with heavily subsidized Chinese vehicles. Draghi, hardly considered a radical political thinker, drew criticism from neoliberal institutions for the proposals.
Local police said about 5,500 people attended the demonstration on Monday while unions put the figure at 11,000.
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'Time for Justice in Alabama': Supermajority of Mercedes-Benz Workers File for UAW Vote
"We are standing up for every worker in Alabama," said one employee. "We're going to turn things around with this vote. We're going to end the Alabama discount."
Apr 05, 2024
The alleged illegal union-busting that Mercedes-Benz autoworkers in Vance, Alabama accused the car company of in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board has not weakened the resolve of pro-union employees, a supermajority of whom now support a union election, according to the United Auto Workers.
The union announced Friday that more than 5,000 workers at the company's nonunion plant have filed a petition with the NLRB in favor of an election, with the workers aiming for a vote by early May.
"It's time for change at Mercedes," said the UAW. "It's time for justice in Alabama. It's time for Mercedes workers to stand up. That's why Mercedes workers have filed for their vote to join the UAW, and to win a better life."
The announcement comes weeks after Volkswagen employees in Chattanooga, Tennessee filed for a union election that's expected to be held April 17-19.
Both union votes are the result of aggressive campaigning by the UAW, including union president Shawn Fain, in the wake of a historic "stand-up strike" that pushed the Big Three automakers to agree to new contracts for about 150,000 workers late last year.
After the victory, Fain announced the launch of the largest union organizing drive in U.S. history, aiming to welcome 150,000 workers at nonunion auto plants into the UAW.
Over 10,000 autoworkers in recent months have signed union cards, and the UAW said Friday that employees at more than two dozen facilities are also organizing.
Mercedes' two U.S. plants in Alabama and South Carolina are its only facilities in the world where workers are not represented by a union. Workers in Vance say they want better healthcare, retirement security, safety protocols, and paid sick days.
Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator at Mercedes, said the union vote is part of an effort to ensure carmakers no longer view Alabama as a state where workers can be compensated unfairly.
"We are standing up for every worker in Alabama," said Kimbrell. "At Mercedes, at Hyundai, and at hundreds of other companies, Alabama workers have made billions of dollars for executives and shareholders, but we haven't gotten our fair share. We're going to turn things around with this vote. We're going to end the Alabama discount."
Moesha Chandler, an assembly team member, said her job has given her "serious problems with my shoulders and hands."
"We are voting for safer jobs at Mercedes," said Chandler. "When you're still in your 20s and your body is breaking down, that's not right. By winning our union, we'll have the power to make the work safer and more sustainable.
The UAW celebrated the news out of Vance by releasing a video showing a recent rally where Fain encouraged workers to support the union effort.
"You gotta believe you can win, that this job can be better, that your life will be better, and that those things are worth fighting for," Fain told the Mercedes workers. "That's why we stand up."
The growing pro-union movement across the South represents "huge stakes," said Lauren Kaori Gurley, a labor reporter for The Washington Post. The UAW has faced resistance from right-wing politicians across the South for decades as it has attempted to unionize factories.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, said Thursday that the UAW's efforts are a "threat from Detroit" that "has no interest in seeing the people of Alabama succeed."
Ivey's comments indicated that the governor "thinks so little of Alabama workers, that we're only good for cheap labor," Kimbrell told AL.com.
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Bernie Sanders Calls for Major Overhaul to Solve US Retirement Crisis
"If Congress can bail out the crooks on Wall Street," said the senator, "please do not tell me that Congress can't support a secure retirement for working Americans."
Mar 04, 2024
Days after hearing the testimony of a fourth-generation autoworker whose family has experienced first-hand the shredding of the social contract over the course of several decades, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders demanded on Monday that Congress swiftly pass legislation to cut the "unacceptable" rate of poverty among senior citizens and ensure that American workers can once again "retire with the dignity and the respect that they deserve."
In an op-ed for Fox News, Vermont independent senator wrote about the hearing he held last week as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee about the country's retirement crisis.
The committee heard from Sara Schambers, whose grandfather retired at 55 from his job as an autoworker at Ford Motor Company, receiving "a pension and good healthcare" provided by the company where he'd worked for three decades.
Schambers' grandmother had to retire early due to a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig's disease, "but she didn’t have to choose between paying her medical bills and buying dinner for her family, because her job provided her with the retirement security she needed."
In sharp contrast, Schambers told Sanders and the rest of the committee that she will not have healthcare or a pension when she retires from her job as an autoworker.
"For generations, getting a job at Ford meant stability and security," said Schambers. "It meant being able to plan for yourself and your children. It meant being able to buy a house and see a future for yourself. But for those of us who were hired in after the financial crisis, that has not been our truth."
Schambers said auto companies have been "adamant that they couldn't afford to add to our pension liability... and that giving back our pensions could affect their stock prices and possibly lead to lower credit ratings. Nowadays, a stock price is more important than 150,000 autoworkers."
In his op-ed, Sanders wrote that the loss of pension and fixed benefit plans among American workers—60% of whom had them in the early 1980s, compared to just 4% in 2023—has led to a 23% poverty rate among senior citizens, one of the highest rates compared to other wealthy countries, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
"In Denmark, only 3% of seniors live in poverty," wrote Sanders. "In France, the senior poverty rate is 4.4%. In Germany, it's 9.1%. In Canada, it's 12.3%. In the United Kingdom, it's 15.5%."
Sanders called on Congress to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which he introduced last year with nine other senators, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Tina Smith (D-Minn.).
The bill would make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years and expand the programs benefits for seniors and people with disabilities by $2,400 a year, making a difference to the 1-in-4 senior citizens who now live on less than $15,000 per year and 1-in-2 who live on less than $30,000 per year, as the Senate HELP Committee noted in a report ahead of the hearing last week.
In keeping with Sanders' longtime push to require the wealthy to pay their fair share into the program, the Social Security Expansion Act would apply the Social Security payroll tax to all income, including those from capital gains and dividends, for those who make more than $250,000 per year.
Currently, the senator wrote, the wealthiest Americans benefit from a cap on the Social Security payroll tax.
"Absurdly and unfairly, a billionaire pays the same amount of money into Social Security as someone who makes $168,700 a year," wrote Sanders. "That means, if you make up to $168,700 a year, you pay 6.2% of your income in Social Security taxes. But if you make 10 times more—$1,687,000—you pay just 0.62% of your income in Social Security taxes."
"That may make sense to someone," he added. It doesn't make sense to me."
In an interview with CNN over the weekend, Sanders was asked about a Republican proposal to raise the retirement age instead of properly funding Social Security by taxing the rich.
"Brilliant idea," said the senator sarcastically. "Yes, we've got our people, 87-year-olds packing groceries in a supermarket. You know, really? People have worked hard their whole lives, this is the richest country in the history of the world. Raise the retirement age, cut benefits? I don't think so."
Sanders proposed that every corporation in America should be required to either provide their employees with a retirement plan or "give workers the option of contributing to a federal pension plan similar to what members of Congress and federal employees receive."
"If Congress can provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks to billionaires and large corporations," said the senator, "if Congress can bail out the crooks on Wall Street who caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, homes, and life savings back in 2008, please do not tell me that Congress can't support a secure retirement for working Americans."
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