Auto companies and the Anti-worker Ideology of Business

["Vic Thorpe" <just.solutions@pandora.be>]

Despite recognising that my role in this discussion is that of 'Moderator',
I cannot resist responding to the twin discussions on (a) auto companies as
targets for worker buy-out and (b) institutionalized conflict between
management and union, as mentioned by Joe.

1.  Recently, I have been involved in promoting and closely following an
attempt by the Daewoo Motor Union to bid for its failing  company in Korea.
The history is fascinating.  The company has been bled dry by its
mother-company (Daewoo Heavy Engineering) and its former CEO is now on the
run from the authorities for alleged involvement in a huge accounting fraud.
(Last seen, by the way, on a Miami golf course, so US friends please keep a
look out for Mr Kim Woo-choong!).

So far as capital equipment goes, however, the company is streets ahead of
most other major producers, with several brand new development facilities
and some technically advanced designs.  It just has no cash left, through no
fault of its product or its workforce.

Enter General Motors - offering to take the company off management's hands
for nothing, less half the personnel, to make it an operating base for GM's
Asian expansion.

Unsurprisingly, the Daewoo Motor workers felt they could do better than this
and have opposed the deal.  They have tried to open discussions with
management on a union-led buy-out alternative that would save the main plant
and most jobs.

Management refuses to take any such proposal seriously coming, as it does,
from the workers.  They would rather give the company away to GM and
increase the concentration already very apparent in this industry.

2.  In another recent case, the remnants of a once-proud British Steel
industry - now a joint British/Dutch venture called CORUS - are under
pre-terminal threat through the closure of one big plant in South Wales and
massive job cuts everywhere (following many years of constant job erosion).

A union-backed bid to buy the threatened plant - patterned on the ESOP deals
that have given some relief in the US steel industry - has just been turned
down by the company.  NOT, as one might think, because it was not
financially viable or sufficient, but because, in the company's words "to
invite additional competition in the present market would totally undermine
the objectives of our proposed restructuring".

In this case the response is clear evidence of a violation of competition
rules - 'we won't produce and we will make sure noone else can'.  But apart
from that, it does demonstrate exactly why there IS, in fact, a conflict of
interest between management and workforce inherent in many cases of company
closure in the present phase of CAPITAL CONCENTRATION.

And the essence lies in those last words.  Worker ownership runs counter to
the trend for capital and market concentration and will naturally be opposed
by big capital holders.  Unless labor begins to understand this concept and
fight for its rights to own capital as well as receive a wage, the race to
private monopoly ownership of the means of production and therefore the
monopoly right to determine terms and conditions of labor will simply be
hastened.

Vic Thorpe