by Samuel Messidor
A worker at the Stellantis Jeep assembly facility in Toledo, OH was killed on the job Wednesday. Antonio Gaston, 53, was working on the line when it started moving and crushed him to death. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Stellantis itself, and the United Auto Workers under which the Stellantis workers are organized are all holding investigations into Gaston’s death.
Gaston leaves behind a wife and four children. Before working in the Toledo plant, he was a worker at the Stellantis facility in Belvidere, IL until the company shut it down in 2023 and moved some of the laid off workers to other plants. The Federal government has promised Stellantis $334 million to invest in EV production in Belvidere, but the overproduction crisis is causing auto manufacturers to balk at EV investments, including EV maker Tesla, which has laid off tens of thousands.
The UAW under president Shawn Fain held a rally in Belvidere where Fain blamed Stellantis’s “corporate greed” for Gaston’s killing, and where he reiterated his call made this week at the Democratic National Convention for Stellantis to reopen their manufacturing facilities in Belvidere. Stellantis agreed to reopen production in Belvidere as part of the contract won in the 2023 “Stand Up” Strike against the Big Three auto manufacturers, a partial strike during which most workers were kept on the line to keep working.
The union bureaucracy actually left the timing of the Belvidere investments up to the company and to “market forces”, as the company points out in its communications in response to Fain’s strike threats, and has stated that it is indefinitely postponing the reopening of their Belvidere operations. For its part, the union’s official communications say they will strike if they must to make Stellantis adhere to their promise.
With the Belvidere rally, Fain has moved from carrying water for Democratic wing of the genocidal US ruling class mafia to using Gaston’s death as added rhetorical weight for his chest-beating. Since the contract imposed on the auto workers at the Big Three, thousands of blue collar workers and white collar office staff have been laid off across the three companies. Recently, Stellantis announced it will lay off up to 2,500 workers at its Warren, MI assembly plant. No strike threats have emerged from the union bureaucracy around these layoffs—instead, Fain has laid the blame solely at Stellantis CEO Tavares’s feet, casting him as a villain when his own sell-out contract did nothing to defend the workers from the coming layoffs.
With the layoffs come increased work tempos and more job duties for the workers left standing on the line, and Stellantis is currently driving to increase their flagging profits amid the general imperialist crisis of overproduction that is leading a number of industries to destroy the overproduced means of production and throw thousands of workers into unemployment.
The UAW local at Toledo has posted an online fundraiser to collect money for Gaston’s family.
Photo: Antonio Gaston, 53, husband and father killed on the job at a Stellantis Jeep assembly facility in Toledo, OH. Photo retrieved from GoFundMe
