by Samuel Messidor
Deere & Co (John Deere), manufacturer of farming and forestry equipment, recently announced it is laying off about 600 factory workers and 300 salaried employees across Illinois and Iowa, citing an anticipated drop in sales for the year. This adds to the over 1,000 workers who have already been cut in the last year.
At least one of the company’s parts suppliers, Gates Corp. in Iowa, is fully shutting down, laying off 41 workers as John Deere hacks at its workforce.
The United Auto Workers, under which are organized 10,000 John Deere factory workers, released a statement calling the layoffs “reckless” and condemning “corporate greed” for driving the layoffs which come amid $43 billion in stock buybacks for investors in the last 20 years and record $10 billion in profits for 2023. The union has not stated how or whether it will fight the layoffs.
The “recklessness” is the usual capitalist frenzied drive for profits that leads to inevitable cyclical crises, with the company over-producing the agricultural means of production and now suffering from the inability to profitably utilize its capital and sell the consequentially overproduced products. Marx calls the idea that greedy individual bourgeois are depriving workers of their “fair share”, a rising tide lifting all boats, an illusion of “bourgeois socialism”. The layoffs are part and parcel of the system, and not the result of this or that capitalist’s personality quirks.
The layoffs come as the general crisis of imperialism deepens, with stock markets recently plummeting due to lower hiring numbers in the US economy. Widespread layoffs and hiring slowdowns have begun in heavy industry, tech, and logistics. With the constant need to increase profits comes the cycle of overproduction which causes profitability to fall; capitalism then seeks to reduce its work force, destroying production, all to compensate. This economic law has little to do with individual desires of the capitalist.
10,000 Deere & Co workers went on strike at over a dozen factories in 2021 for 5 weeks over forced overtime, two-tier union contracts, and low pay and benefits while the company raked in record profits. The financier’s newspaper Wall Street Journal has wasted no time in blaming the recent layoffs on the unionized workers and their 2021 strike, while Common Dreams has published an op-ed begging Biden to stop the transfer of American jobs to Mexico, citing that it receives federal funding—the usual national chauvinist dog-whistle of the populists. For its part, Deere & Co says they’re expanding production of lower value-adding facilities in Mexico and preserving the higher value-adding, more capital-intensive and mechanized facilities in the US.
John Deere announced at a 2022 trade show that it was investing into self-driving tractor technology for large-scale agriculture to cut labor by increasing mechanization and automation. John Deere has also been expanding manufacturing into the southeastern United States, similarly to the various auto manufacturers moving to the South for big tax breaks, protection under anti-union state governments, and low wages (coined as the “Alabama Discount”).
