[After a catastrophic month of November for car…]
Socialist Press1979 1979-12-12Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
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After a catastrophic month of November for car sales, the future of the giant US Chrysler Corporation looks more bleak than ever.
Despite cut-price offers by every major US motor manufacturer, car sales plunged by 22% for General Motors and 24% for Fords-while Chrysler was worst hit of all.
And in the truck market Chrysler's sales were down by a disastrous 54%-far worse than the 33% drop suffered by GM and Ford's 24.6%.
Chrysler-$750 million in the red on its 1979 operation-is therefore in an extremely weak position in pressing its appeal to the Carter administration and to Congress for Federal cash assistance.
While Carter-not wanting to carry the can for 158,000 Chrysler redundancies election year-has proposed that $1.5 billion be made available on condition Chrysler raises a similar amount independently, US bankers and Congressmen are not so keen.
The Senate has amended the, Carter proposals to offer only $1.25 billion, on condition that Chrueler raices $2. 75 hillionMiller half of it from imposing a three year wage freeze on Chrysler workers!
Even United Auto Workers leader Fraser-who has already donated $400-million of members pay and benefits to the Chrysler relief effort-has had to come out against such a wage freeze, which has also been denounced by Treasury Secretarv William Miller • But even without the wage freeze the Senate's plan is a non-starter-since there is no way Chrysler can raise $2.75 billion from hostile bankers in the midst of a sales slump.
For Chrysler workers the answer must be to prepare to occupy threatened factories to prevent their closure, demanding that the UAW in Chrysler, Fords and GM take action to secure a programme of work sharing on full pay, to operate across the motor industry.
Such a policy, the only defence of jobs in the industry as a whole, is clearly incompatible with the private ownership of the US car monopolies: it cries out for the nationalisation of the entire US motor industry, its suppliers, dealers and bankers, without compensation and under workers management.
And this, in turn, points to the need for the US trade union movement, led by the UAW, to break from Carter, Kennedy and the capitalist Democratic Party, and build a labour party to carry through a socialist prooramme in the TISA.