{"id":1316113,"date":"2023-11-07T06:54:10","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T06:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=303293"},"modified":"2023-11-07T06:54:10","modified_gmt":"2023-11-07T06:54:10","slug":"is-a-mayday-now-looming-for-our-billionaire-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/11\/07\/is-a-mayday-now-looming-for-our-billionaire-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Is a \u2018Mayday!\u2019 Now Looming for Our Billionaire Class?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The folks at the U.S. Coast Guard know \u201cmayday\u201d as well as anyone. Every year they handle<\/a> thousands of \u201cmayday\u201d distress calls. Their counterparts worldwide handle thousands more. Overall, the number of \u201cmayday\u201d calls since the 1920s \u2014 when \u201cmayday\u201d became the international go-to for declaring emergency situations \u2014 now runs well into the millions.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019ve never had a \u201cmayday\u201d more socially consequential than the \u201cmayday\u201d that U.S. auto workers have just thrust upon our global calendar. This potential \u201cmayday\u201d just happens to impact only our world\u2019s richest \u2014 and has suddenly become a much more real possibility than a crash of any one of their outrageously deluxe private jets.<\/p>\n

What have U.S. auto workers done? They\u2019ve successfully bargained a set of watershed contracts that establish May 1, 2028 as the day the workers of our world may actually unite, for the first time ever, against our world\u2019s super wealthy.<\/p>\n

The new contracts the United Auto Workers union is now signing with Detroit\u2019s Big Three \u2014 Ford, GM, and Stellantis \u2014 all set April 30, 2028 as their expiration date. That would make May 1 the day the workers the three new contracts cover walk out on strike if no new deal materializes.<\/p>\n

This May 1 date, of course, holds enormous global significance. Working people the world over have been celebrating the first of May as \u201cInternational Labor Day\u201d for generations, in a tradition that began back in 1886 when workers in the United States struggling for an eight-hour day staged a May 1 national protest.<\/p>\n

If May 1, 2028 arrives without signed contracts for America\u2019s unionized auto workers, UAW president Shawn Fain has now made plain, these workers don\u2019t plan on walking out alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles,\u201d says<\/a> Fain. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few, then it\u2019s important that we not only strike but that we strike together.\u201d<\/p>\n

And by aligning the UAW\u2019s next big contract deadline with International Labor Day, the union is clearly inviting coordination beyond<\/em> the national level. The May Day that workers worldwide have so long honored, as Fain notes<\/a>, has always been \u201cmore than just a day of commemoration, it\u2019s a call to action.\u201d And the labor movement worldwide, as the latest headlines remind us, is showing real signs of acting more in strategic concert.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Within the global auto industry, for instance, no corporation more embodies the inequality our corporate world order has spread so aggressively than the non-union Tesla. Under CEO Elon Musk, the world\u2019s richest<\/a> single individual, Tesla pays wages that run substantially below the hourly rates at Detroit\u2019s Big Three, and that gap will only widen after the new UAW contracts go into full effect.<\/p>\n

This shortchanging of workers has sped the growth of Musk\u2019s fabulous fortune and helped boost Tesla\u2019s share of the global electrical vehicle market to about 60 percent. The new UAW contracts, predicts<\/a> German Bender of the Swedish think-tank Arena, could well \u201cboost union interest among Tesla workers.\u201d<\/p>\n

That interest already seems to be growing. On the final Friday of the UAW walkout in the United States, workers at Tesla-owned servicing shops in Sweden went out on strike \u2014 after five years of fruitless attempts to get Tesla\u2019s Swedish subsidiary to reach a bargaining agreement. That strike has now spread to all auto shops in Sweden that do work on Tesla cars.<\/p>\n

This Swedish walkout, the global union confederation IndustriALL has announced, represents<\/a> the first formal strike against Tesla anywhere in the world. And the challenge to Tesla may soon be spreading beyond Sweden. Germany\u2019s largest union, Bloomberg reports<\/a>, is hoping to organize a 12,000-worker Tesla plant near Berlin.<\/p>\n

Tesla\u2019s over 120,000 workers worldwide will certainly see plenty to like in the new UAW contracts in the United States. At Ford, workers who started as temps making $16.67 an hour will be automatically moving to permanent status and an hourly wage rate of at least $24.91. That rate will hit<\/a> $40.82 an hour by the contract\u2019s end, and any inflation between now and then will kick that rate still higher.<\/p>\n

Workers in major American industries haven\u2019t seen gains that stunning since the middle of the 20th century, a time when the chief execs of America\u2019s largest corporations averaged only just over 20 times the compensation of their workers. That gap today, the Economic Policy Institute calculates<\/a>, is now running nearly 350 times.<\/p>\n

But the greatest significance of the new UAW auto industry contracts may be the impact these bargaining triumphs will have on the future. These agreements could become the single most important step to a more equal world that any of us have ever seen.<\/p>\n

The giants of American auto manufacturing, as Fain puts it, \u201cunderestimated\u201d their own workers\u2019 capacity to unite and fight together.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have shown the companies, the American public, and the whole world that the working class is not done fighting,\u201d he adds<\/a>. \u201cIn fact, we\u2019re just getting started.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Is a \u2018Mayday!\u2019 Now Looming for Our Billionaire Class?<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The folks at the U.S. Coast Guard know \u201cmayday\u201d as well as anyone. Every year they handle thousands of \u201cmayday\u201d distress calls. Their counterparts worldwide handle thousands more. Overall, the number of \u201cmayday\u201d calls since the 1920s \u2014 when \u201cmayday\u201d became the international go-to for declaring emergency situations \u2014 now runs well into the millions. More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Is a \u2018Mayday!\u2019 Now Looming for Our Billionaire Class?<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316113"}],"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\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316113"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1318260,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316113\/revisions\/1318260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}