Workers are seeing employers make money hand over fist while they work harder for wages that are worth less and less.<\/q><\/aside>\n\u201cToday, you need a demonstration of worker power and solidarity,\u201d Lichtenstein said. \u201cIf Biden knows what\u2019s good for him, he\u2019ll continue to support the autoworkers as he did when he visited their picket line. This strike has become a social movement with the capacity to mobilize enormous numbers of working class people on behalf of the trade unions and those politicians who demonstrate their solidarity with the UAW and other unions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Workers are seeing employers make money hand over fist while they work harder for wages that are worth less and less. That not only drives the shift in expectations that we are seeing but creates the chance for pitched battles \u2014 like the one at the Big Three \u2014 to become national referendums on capitalism.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n “We Can Unmake It”<\/h2>\n \n
Fain didn\u2019t pull any punches in his speech after Biden, drawing a historical parallel between the autoworkers who built B-24 Liberator bombers during World War II and those on strike today.<\/p>\n
Eighty years later, \u201cit\u2019s a different kind of war we\u2019re fighting,\u201d Fain said. \u201cToday, the enemy isn\u2019t some foreign country miles away. It\u2019s right here in our own area. It\u2019s corporate greed.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the weapon we produce to fight that enemy is the liberators \u2014 the true liberators. It\u2019s the working-class people. And the difference between them and us is, just as our theme song \u2018Solidarity Forever\u2019 says: \u2018Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel would turn.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s different about working-class people. Whether we\u2019re building cars or trucks or running parts distribution centers; whether we\u2019re writing movies or performing TV shows; whether we\u2019re making coffee at Starbucks; whether it\u2019s nursing people back to health; whether it\u2019s educating students, from preschool to college \u2014 we do the heavy lifting. We do the real work. Not the CEOs, not the executives.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd though we don\u2019t know it, that\u2019s what power is. We have the power. The world is of our making. The economy is of our making. This industry is of our making.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd as we\u2019ve shown, when we withhold our labor, we can unmake it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seven thousand United Auto Workers (UAW) members at two more assembly plants have walked off the job at noon ET today, UAW president Shawn Fain announced in a Facebook Live appearance this morning. Joining the strike are Ford\u2019s Chicago Assembly plant and General Motors\u2019 Lansing Delta Township Assembly in Michigan. Fain announced that Stellantis would [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1235609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1235610,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235609\/revisions\/1235610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1235609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1235609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1235609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}