by Samuel Messidor
Stellantis, the automotive manufacturer of Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep, has backtracked on its promise to reopen the idled Belvidere, IL assembly plant secured by the autoworkers during their 2023 strike against the “Big Three” automakers. United Auto Workers locals at Stellantis are filing grievances against the company after it issued a statement to the union citing unfavorable market conditions forcing them to put the Belvidere plans on hold indefinitely.
UAW President Shawn Fain, speaking at the opening night of the Democratic National Convention while sporting a t-shirt reading “Trump is a Scab”, denounced the decision by the company. He continued to place the blame for Stellantis’s economic woes solely at the feet of its CEO, instead of identifying the company’s moves as the actions and consequences of the very system he endorsed at the DNC. During his speech, Fain hinted at a strike without saying the word itself, and said Stellantis “must keep its promises they made to America in our union contract”, doubling down on his national chauvinist rhetoric—as if the contradiction is America vs. Stellantis rather than working class vs. owning class.
Fain’s strike threat is undercut by the UAW’s own online statement which says “our goal is not to strike” while asking Stellantis to invest in “good blue collar American jobs”.
The 2023 “Stand Up Strike” against the Big Three saw the workers’ hands tied by the union bureaucracy, who kept the majority of workers on the production line and out of the fight, protecting the companies’ profits and weakening the strike. The sell-out nature of the contract secured through this partial strike is showing at Stellantis, which has been hit hard by the crisis of overproduction plaguing the capitalists in all corners of the economy.
In fact, the union brass’s bragged-about “promise” won in the contract regarding Belvidere was conditional upon favorable market conditions—meaning investment in Belvidere was left entirely up to the company’s whims. The same goes for the promises from the union brass to the rank-and-file to turn temporary workers into full-timers. Instead, the temps were hit first by the layoffs now biting at the entire Stellantis workforce.
Stellantis is laying off up to 2,500 at the Warren, MI assembly plant, and has recently idled an engine plant in Michigan for one week, citing overproduction of engines. Fain mentioned neither of these attacks on the autoworkers during his speech at the DNC, instead accusing Trump of shutting down auto production, joining in the blame game between the Democrats and Republicans for the consequences of the vicious imperialist system managed by both mafioso political parties. He accused Trump of trafficking in the interests of workers by blaming their grievances on immigrants—“some destitute and desperate person at the border”—while himself trafficking in those interests by calling on workers to support the Democrats, who have been heavily cracking down on the border.
Fain’s speech did not mention at all his own union’s demand for a ceasefire in the US-Zionist genocidal war on the Palestinian people, as he was too busy praising the chief genocidaires Biden and Harris for attending picket lines, never mind that Biden-Harris blocked the rail workers’ strike in 2022—blocked, according to the Democrats, in the interests of America. Like the Stellantis concessions now coming home to roost, the Democrats’ bragged-about promises from the rail monopolies are being walked back, with Union Pacific reneging on its promised days-off policy.
