On March 30, while announcing the government’s bailout plan for the auto makers, President Obama gave voice to this industry’s significance when he noted that the auto industry “is like no other…It’s what helped build the middle class and sustained it throughout the 20th century.” Business writer Peter Drucker has said that “The automobile industry stands for modern industry all over the globe. It is to the twentieth century what the Lancashire cotton mills were to the nineteenth century: the industry of industries.”
Today, as contributor Claire McClinton notes in writing about the auto bailout in this issue of the People’s Tribune (see page 6), “The old manufacturing foundation on which the ‘Middle Class’ stood with good paying jobs and healthcare is being swept away. It is being replaced with a new foundation based on electronics and by extension the drive for cheap labor at home or abroad.”
We have gone from a time when the auto industry directly or indirectly accounted for about one-quarter of the jobs in the U.S. to the situation where employment in auto and many related industries has been declining steadily. By 2008, General Motors was employing only about as many blue-collar workers in the entire U.S. as it used to employ during the 1970s in Flint, Michigan, alone.
Over the long haul, computers and robots are wiping out auto jobs permanently. This is most clearly seen among auto assembly workers. In 1979, some 463,000 auto assembly workers in the US produced about 8 million vehicles. Today, roughly 250,000 assembly workers in the US can produce over 11 million vehicles. The Big Three auto makers alone have made 50 percent gains in manufacturing productivity since 1980. In 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that overall wage and salary employment in the motor vehicle and parts manufacturing industry would fall by 14 percent by 2016 because “productivity improvements will enable manufacturers to produce more vehicles and parts with fewer workers.”
The bottom line is the corporations are not going to employ—or feed—workers they don’t need. An era based on electronic production means factories based on labor-replacing technology instead of factories employing armies of workers. It means factories spread across the planet in a globalized production system made possible by computerized communications. It means unemployed workers competing with one another across the globe for the few jobs that remain. It means falling wages and wiped-out healthcare and retirement benefits. It means permanent unemployment and under-employment for millions in the U.S. and across the globe. And it means the threat of a fascist dictatorship to control those discarded by the system.
When the old economic foundation of society crumbles, the social and political structure that stood on that foundation must also be transformed. This is the process we’re seeing today in our country. The new class of dispossessed being created by automation has no choice but to fight to take power away from the corporations and build a new society where the abundance made possible by electronics is distributed to all based on need, and where people’s rights and economic well-being are guaranteed. It is their program – the program of the dispossessed – that must become the program of the American people. The alternative is to continue a downward spiral into mass poverty under the fascist dictatorship of the corporations. The choice is ours.
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