Trotskyists stand in giant US car plant election

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HAIL Going Yes! Bu CAN 'AND HERE COME THE DEMOCRATS Militant auto workers at Ford Motor Company are currently waging • a spirited campaign for the upcoming UAW Local The United Front Slate is made up of black and white workers, production and skilled and also includes a leading woman militant. Its candidates are running on a class-struggle programme, which includes not only union democracy and a militant. struggle against the company, but also a number of key transitional demands.

Workers' party

The political part of the programme centres on the slogan of a workers' party based on the unions, but it also refers to the need for a workers' government.

The United Front Slate was formed at the beginning of the year by two caucuses in Local 600: the Committee for a Militant and Democratic UAW (CMDUAW) and the 600 Organizer.

With the participation of several independent miliFOR WORKERS' Socialist Press Pric BM BC × 527 tants, the slate nrogramme was negotiated and hammered out.

The process of reaching out and recruiting other unaffiliated militant workers then began. As we go to press, the United Front Slate has 19 candidates running from five of the 14 units of Local 600.

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Local 600, the largest local in the UAW, has approximately 28,000 active members: The large majority of the membership is based in the gigantic Ford River Rouge complex.

For the past several years workers in: Local 600 have endured increasingly severe "boom-or-bust" cycle attacks THE GIPPER! OUR PRESIDENT Massive and prolonged layoffs have been routinely combined with periods of 58-64 hour work weeks of compulsory overtime.

The Rouge complex itself combines technologically advanced plants with some of the most archaic and obsolete plants in the ANYTHING CUT, ME advanced capitalist word. Ford has attempted to "solve' this problem through layoffs and plant closures, a brutal campaign of speedup, discipline and racist discrimination.

The union bureaucracy at every level has proven supremely unwilling and unable to mobilise the membership to fight any of these attacks.

To plant closures the Local 600 administration has blusteringly responded that they will not be toleratedexcept where they occurand practically begged the company to impose wage and benefit concessions instead.

To the wage concessions recently wrested by Ford from workers in the Steel Division, the union bureaucrats simply argued the company line: 'Take a pay cut or lose your job' CMDUAW: is a caucus based primarily in the Assembly and Engine plants, composed of black and white production workers.

It stands on a revolutionary programme of transitional demands and is politically supported by the Revolutionary Workers League.

The 600 Organizer is a caucus-type organisation composed mainly of skilled trades workers in the Tool and Die unit of Local 600. It publishes a newsletter of the same name, which has taken positions for economo militancy and membership control of the union, against protectionism and for the immediate formation of a workers' party based on the unions.

CMDUAW differs from the 600 Organizer in the higher, : level of its political programme and its tenacious struggle to win workers to that programme. In addition, CMDUAW has an intense commitment to and history of fighting tacism. and of working to build the leadership of black and women WOIKers.

But even. as.. fraternal struggle continues over these issues, both •caucuses have proven definitively that the principled unity of militants in struggle can be a powertul weapon for the working class.

As a final comical footnote, the Rouge Militant Caucus (RMC), the only other opposition group in Local 600 which remains to some degree independent of the bureaucracy, continues to sink deeper into sectarian isolation and irrelevance.

Supported-or rather strangied-politically by the Sas found itsel in a genie quandary over having refuse an invitation to join the United Front Slate without any principled justification for the refusal, while its tiny periphery either shrinks into inactivity or comes United the In February and March 1981 the RMC tried to generate copy for the SL paper Workers Vanguard by calling on Rouge workers to join it for a sitdown strike in the plant cafeteria.

When less than hälf a dozen workers showed up for the sitdown, RMC decided instead to call on. Rouge workers to join the SL's so-called imperialist contingent at the 3 May 1981 anti war demonstration in Washington When that clearl wasn't working, RMC decided to run two of its supporters for President and First Vice President of Local 600.

Running only for these offices and not for any of the unit committee (steward) positions guaranteed the RMC supporters would not "have their hands tied" leading the day-to-day struggles of the working class. It also freed their hands to engage in a propaganda struggle not against the company and the union bureaucrats but against CMDUAW and the United Front Slate.

Meanwhile, CMDUAW and the United Front Slate continue to build the real struggle to remove and replace the sellout bureaucrats who run the UAW at all levels.

This struggle is part and parcel of the struggle for militant strike action against layoffs and plant closures, for political strikes against party based on the unions, to fight for a workers'

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Liaison Committee

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