Dear Brothers and Sisters, 

My name is Jerry White, and I am the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US vice president. My running mate, SEP presidential candidate Joseph Kishore, and I will be on the ballot in Michigan for the November 5 elections.

We are the only candidates who stand with your fight against Stellantis’ attack on your jobs. Biden, Harris and Trump feign concern for autoworkers. But they all support the “right” of the auto bosses and their Wall Street investors to destroy jobs to boost their profits. The Socialist Equality Party does not.

The Socialist Equality Party insists that every worker has the social right to a secure, good-paying and safe job. This unconditional right must take priority over the profit interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy. 

Now is not the time to mince words. If Stellantis is allowed to go ahead with its plan to slash 2,500 jobs by October 8, it will only be a matter of time before Warren Truck and the adjoining Warren Stamping Plant are closed down. Like GM’s Hydro-Matic plant across Nine Mile and the Mound Road Engine Plant south of Eight Mile, the land where your plant sits will be turned into an empty lot.

The leaders of the United Auto Workers are doing everything to chloroform workers from this reality. They promise transfers, voluntary buyouts, and other schemes. But there is no place to put another 2,458 workers while the corporation continues to trim its operations in the US and around the world. 

A fight is necessary, and the line must be drawn here.  

The Socialist Equality Party suggests that the fight be taken up along the following lines: 

1)  Rank-and-file workers can place no confidence in the UAW bureaucracy and must take matters into their own hands.

UAW President Shawn Fain, Vice President Rich Boyer and the rest of the Solidarity House leadership knew that the agreement they signed last fall would give Stellantis and the other automakers a green light to destroy tens of thousands of jobs. Their promises that the Belvidere plant would be reopened and jobs expanded were just as false as their promises that supplemental workers would be converted to full-timers. Now, Fain & Co. would have workers believe that their “Keep the Promise” grievance-writing campaign and empty threats of a strike will stop job cuts. 

A real fight is needed, but the company stooges in Solidarity House and the local union halls will never do it. It must be organized by rank-and-file workers yourselves. We urge Warren Truck workers to join and expand the network of rank-and-file committees that are fighting to transfer power and decision making from the UAW apparatus to the workers on the shop floor. 

This means joining with striking Dakkota workers in Chicago who have formed a rank-and-file committee and defeated four attempts by the UAW bureaucracy to push through sellout contracts with wages as low as $16 an hour and higher out-of-pocket health care costs. The Dakkota workers rank-and-file committee is appealing to workers at the Ford Chicago Assembly Plant ban handling any scab parts and to join them in a common fight to end poverty wages and sweatshop conditions for the workers who produce parts for the Big Three. Warren Truck, all Stellantis workers and all UAW members should back this fight because it is the same fight.  

2)  Warren Truck workers should establish lines of communication and joint action with Stellantis and other autoworkers around the world to fight the global attack on jobs. 

Fain and other UAW leaders are trundling out their same old playbook blaming the job cuts on “foreign executives” who will not “invest in America” and workers in Mexico and other countries. This American-First nationalism has never saved a single job. Instead, it has been used to divide US workers from their brothers and sisters around the world.

There is no such thing as an “American” car, any more than there is an Italian or Chinese one. Stellantis, like GM, Ford, Toyota and VW, are global corporations that exploit workers around the world in a single interconnected production process. In Italy, the company is threatening the jobs of 12,000 workers. 

The Socialist Equality Party supports the fight of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unite workers across national borders and coordinate their struggles to defend the jobs and living standards of workers in every country.

The struggle by the transnational corporations to control markets, raw materials and profits, particularly for electric vehicles, is also taking form in the increasingly dangerous conflict between the US and its economic rivals, above all China, and the danger of world war.

Since selling out autoworkers, Fain has become the chief political spokesperson for Harris, who like Trump, is committed to waging a war for global conquest by US imperialism. But workers have no interests is sacrificing their lives, their children and what little there is left in social spending for war. 

The SEP calls for a halt to the arms shipments to Israel and Ukraine, the dismantling of the US military machine, and the redirection of the more than $1 trillion a year in military spending to public education, free health care and to improve working-class neighborhoods. 

3)  The auto companies must be transformed into public industries, collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class itself. 

The corporations, including US-based GM and Ford, have made billions in profits from autoworkers and have rewarded their executives and investors with massive salaries, dividends and stock buybacks. Tesla boss Elon Musk has accumulated a private fortune of a quarter of a trillion dollars through the brutal exploitation of workers. 

The workers whose collective labor produces this wealth are being stripped of their livelihoods, while those remaining are subjected to exhausting hours, deprived of time for their family and medical appointments, and literally worked to death. 

At Warren Truck countless workers, including Catherine Pace, have died from Covid, which is still infecting 1.4 million people a day. At the Toledo Jeep plant, 53-year-old Antonio Gaston, who had to uproot his family from Belvidere, was crushed to death on August 21 by machinery which workers said was unsafe. On April 17, 46-year-old Tywaun Long died of a heart attack at the Ford Dearborn Truck Plant due to job cuts, long hours and speed up. 

In opposition to the ongoing sacrifice of workers’ lives and health for corporate profit, the Socialist Equality Party calls for shop floor workers to assert their control over production, line speeds and safety. 

In a rational society, the introduction of electric vehicles, robots and other forms of automation would be used to sharply reduce work hours and burdensome labor. But under capitalism it is used to throw workers into the streets and impoverish their families. If EV’s require fewer man hours to produce, the Socialist Equality Party insists, then the work week should be shortened to 30 hours with not only no loss in pay but with an increase in wages. 

None of these demands or any other social rights can be won without the transfer of power to the working class, the expropriation of the fortunes of Musk, Bezos and the rest of the ruling class and the placing of the giant industries, built up through generations of workers’ labor, under the control of the working class itself.

When he was running for UAW president in 2022, Mack Trucks workers Will Lehman said, “Many workers do not understand what socialism is, but if they did, they would support it.”

It is a fact that those workers who led the heroic struggle that founded the UAW, including the 1936-37 Flint Sit-down Strike were socialists. The beginning of the downfall of the UAW was the anti-socialist purges of the 1940s and 1950s and the consolidation of a UAW bureaucracy based on the defense of American imperialism and capitalist private property. 

In 1980, during the first Chrysler bankruptcy, UAW President Douglas Fraser joined the company’s board of directors and agreed to the layoff of 50,000 autoworkers and a half a billion in wage cuts to supposedly “save American jobs.” At the time, UAW Vice President Marc Stepp declared: “I believe the company will have to trim operations down. We have free enterprise in this country. The corporations have a right to make a profit.”

Where has this left autoworkers? Since 1979, UAW membership has fallen by one million. Detroit went from having the highest standard of living per worker in the US in 1960 to becoming the poorest big city in America by 1990. 

If Stellantis can cut jobs at Warren Truck it will only lead to a new wave of plant closures, mass layoffs, family breakups, drug abuse and suicides. 

A line must be drawn at Warren Truck and the Motor City! 

The Democrats and Republicans are offering nothing but empty promises. Harris is taking the mantel of warmonger-in-chief from Biden and is working with Fain & Co. to suppress opposition. Trump is trying to exploit the anger of workers over falling living standards by scapegoating immigrants and establishing a dictatorship to crush working-class resistance to capitalism.

The Socialist Equality Party is running in the elections not to tinker around the edges of this failed system but to provide workers with the policies and program that they need to abolish exploitation, war and inequality. But we are not miracle workers: this is the program that workers must fight for.

For years, the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter has been read by hundreds of workers at Warren Truck. We have won the respect of workers and the fear and hatred of the UAW bureaucracy because we have never shied away from telling the truth. Joseph Kishore and I stand ready to assist you by campaigning for the broadest support for your struggle from workers and young people in the US and around the world. Everything now depends on you taking up this decisive fight.