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layoffs
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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Workers Get Boot as Boar's Head Plant Behind Listeria Deaths Shuts Down
A union statement said the closure was "especially unfortunate" because workers shouldn't be punished for the deadly outbreak, but a deal protecting employees' livelihoods was reached.
Sep 13, 2024
About 500 workers lost their current jobs when Boar's Head on Friday announced the closure of the Virginia meatpacking plant behind a deadly listeria outbreak.
A chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which represents the workers, said in a statement that the closure was "especially unfortunate" given that the workforce was not to blame for the outbreak, which killed at least nine people nationwide.
The UFCW announced that it had reached a deal with the company to allow the workers to transfer to another Boar's Head facility or receive a severance package "above and beyond" what's required by law.
"Thankfully these workers have a union they can count on to always have their backs," the union statement said.We received some unfortunate news – the Boar's Head plant located in Jarratt, Va. is closing indefinitely, impacting hundreds of workers at the facility. Read our statement: https://t.co/h551b80cF0
— UFCW Local 400 (@UFCW400) September 13, 2024
The outbreak caused nine deaths and 57 hospitalizations, and led to the recall of millions of pounds of Boar's Head deli meat. The company has already been targeted in a number of wrongful death and other lawsuits.
Listeria, a bacterial illness, originated from the Boar's Head plant in the small town of Jarratt, Virginia, as genome sequencing tests confirmed in late July. The company said this week that the contamination had come from liverwurst processing and announced it would discontinue the product.
A 2022 inspection of the plant found that it posed an "imminent threat" to public health, according to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) records released this week. At the time, the plant already had "rust, mold, garbage, and insects on the plant floors and walls," The New York Timesreported.
Sarah Sorscher, a food safety expert at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told the Times that "they shouldn't have allowed this company to keep producing ready-to-eat products, lunch meat that's going to go on people’s tables, when they're seeing this level of violation. Consumers had to die before this plant got shut down, really is the bottom line."
More recent USDA records, which were released in late August, also showed wretched conditions at the plant.
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What Kamala Harris Must Do to Win Working-Class Voters
If Harris and the Democrats don’t find a way to intervene to stop the needless mass layoffs that are happening right now, there’s a good chance and Trump/Vance might fill the void.
Jul 25, 2024
Can Kamala Harris reach blue collar workers?
There’s a way, but it won’t be easy.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will have to do what few Democrats have been willing to do—directly prevent corporations from laying off workers to finance stock buybacks.
Imagine if Kamala Harris said the following: “My administration will do all in its power to stop the needless mass layoffs that have plagued working people for over a generation.”
Right now, in Racine, Wisconsin, Case-New Holland (CNH), a global maker of agricultural equipment, is laying off 200 workers as part of a $150 million cost-reduction effort. That savings is helping to finance the $652 million CNH has spent over the past year on stock buybacks.
The same goes in spades for the John Deere company, which is exporting 1,000 jobs from Illinois and Iowa to Mexico to finance $12.2 billion in stock buybacks.
Are these stock buybacks adding new technologies needed to build better farm implements? Are they putting new AI programs into tractors to plow fields on their own? Do they help make workers more productive or enhance company sales? Not a chance.
Stock buybacks are stock manipulation. A company buying back its stock artificially boosts the stock price without creating new products or developing more efficient ways to produce old ones. It’s the same earnings, but more per share, driving up the share price, because the buybacks reduce the number of shares.
How do stock buybacks help a company? They don’t, but they sure help CNH executives, who are paid in stock incentives, and they surely enrich the Wall Street barons who cash in their shares to reap a quick profit.
But wait, isn’t stock manipulation illegal, akin to insider trading? Before 1982, stock buybacks were illegal—corporations could only use 2% of their profits to repurchase their own shares. But that year the Securities and Exchange Commission foolishly removed that restriction, and all hell broke loose. Corporations have ever since laid off workers to finance more and more stock buybacks. Today about 68% of all corporate profits go to stock buybacks. And since 1996, when the government started keeping track, more that 30 million workers have been subject to mass layoffs. (For all the gory details, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
What Can Kamala Harris Do for Case-New Holland Workers?
Not much, worries Richard Glowacki, a union official trying to deal with the CNH mass layoff. “President’s don’t dictate what companies do—except in wartime,” he said.
Technically, that’s true, but presidents have the bully pulpit, and they can use it to get the attention of CEOs who need to do business with the federal government.
That’s exactly what former President Donald Trump did to Carrier, the air conditioning giant, in 2017, when he pressured the company not to move 1,100 jobs to Mexico. (About 800 may have been saved, at a cost.)
Greg Hays, the CEO of Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, made it clear why he gave in to the demand.
“I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. I also know that about 10% of our revenue comes from the U.S. government.”
Hays understood the implicit power of the federal government, which purchases more than $700 billion a year in goods and services from private corporations. That power could be used more generally to protect the livelihoods of working people.
Imagine if Kamala Harris said the following:
My administration will do all in its power to stop the needless mass layoffs that have plagued working people for over a generation. Since 1996, more than 30 million workers have lost their jobs during a mass layoff. These devastating events are harming the health and economic well-being of our people and their communities. Many of these layoffs are economically unnecessary and are only intended to enrich CEOs and their Wall Street investors.
This must stop.
In our free enterprise system, corporations are free to expand and contract their workforces. But taxpayers are not obliged to reward those that lay off workers with federal contracts. Right now, more than $700 billion a year of taxpayer money goes to corporations for goods and services needed to provide for the public good and our common defense.
Worker tax payers have the right to demand that their money is used to protect jobs in corporations that receive these contracts.
Therefore, my administration will add a new clause to every federal contract valued at $10 million or more: “For the life of this contract, no compulsory layoffs.”
If a federal contractor wants to reduce the number of employees while under contract, it must be a voluntary layoff through which the employee willing accepts a negotiated buyout package and is not forced to do so.
The principle is simple and clear: Taxpayer money should not be used to lay off taxpayers. Taxpayer money should support job stability.
This may be a bridge too far for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Corporations that do business with the federal government aren’t going to like it and will surely cry “socialism!” But if the Democrats don’t find a way to intervene to stop the needless mass layoffs that are happening right now, there’s a good chance and Trump/Vance might fill the void.
BTW, both John Deere and CNH are federal contractors.
Walking the picket line is good. So are infrastructure investments that create new jobs in the future. But nothing beats saving a worker’s job in the here and now. That really sends the most powerful message of all, that the Democrats are willing and able to fight for the working class.
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