by Samuel Messidor
Stellantis—the maker of Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram—has announced that it will lay off up to 2,450 workers at their Warren, MI assembly plant by October 8, moving from two shifts to one as they plan to discontinue production of the Ram 1500 Classic. With the layoffs, Stellantis hopes to lessen its stock of vehicles and focus on luxury SUV production at the plant. The announcement comes amid mass layoffs across multiple industries as the imperialists’ economic crisis deepens.
Stellantis had been signaling that layoffs were coming even before the recent “Stand Up Strike” of the UAW against the “Big Three” auto manufacturers, but the union bureaucracy did not raise struggle for contract language around defense from layoffs, though they did reach an agreement to reopen a smaller plant in Illinois during the strike. The local Warren union brass, for their part, said the shifts had already been reduced, and they knew layoffs were coming for some time before the announcement at the beginning of August.
The UAW says they will “hold Stellantis to the contract” in response to the layoffs announcement, the same no-action language the Teamsters brass used in response to the recent mass layoffs at UPS. UAW chief Shawn Fain has also denounced Stellantis for their widespread layoffs internationally, saying that the CEO of Stellantis is “a disgrace and an embarrassment to a once-great American company” while praising Ford and GM for “fantastic profits and increased sales”. He raised alarm about Stellantis shifting some production to Mexico in the same national-chauvinist dog-whistles around the recent John Deere layoffs and by Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien at the Republican National Convention, as if workers in the US have any stake in monopoly corporations. The imperialists go wherever it is most profitable, whether it be “offshore” or the union-hostile South, which harms workers everywhere by forcing them into competition with one another and driving down wages and working conditions.
Meanwhile, the UAW bureaucracy has been busy campaigning with Kamala Harris, Vice-Genocidaire and “top cop”, spreading electoral illusions to the UAW rank-and-file and the working class in general. Fain stated that Harris and Walz are “one of us”—meaning workers—and contrasting them to Trump, despite both campaigns being beholden to billionaires.
In exchange for mobilizing their membership and spending millions of union workers’ dollars on the electoral farce for the Democrats, the UAW received the promise of preserving some unionized jobs as part of a $1.7 billion grant paid to the auto monopolies. Biden’s proposed grant—the workers’ own money in the form of taxes—aims to give an impetus to EV production to put a band-aid on the overproduction bullet hole.
Mass layoffs at the monopolies are not at the whim of the individual CEOs—as Fain has said now about Stellantis and recently about John Deere—but rather an inevitable effect of the developing imperialist crisis. The capitalists overproduce in their incessant drive for profits, especially the means of production, which they are now destroying and laying off workers en masse in an attempt to recover.
Stellantis is not the only auto corporation suffering: Nissan, Ford, and Renault are also posting declines in net income and seeing their stocks fall. Tesla has also begun mass layoffs, and while Donald Trump promised Elon Musk he would use protectionist trade tariffs to “save” the auto industry from “complete obliteration”, Musk replied: “Obliteration is coming anyway”. The two joked about mass firing striking workers in a recent interview on Musk’s social media platform X.
