At the top levels of the labor bureaucracy in Washington D.C., a debate is raging about the future of the labor movement. Underlying the debate is the failure of the top labor officials to stop the decline of organized labor. When John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, he pledged to increase organizing. Since then, despite a push to organize, the percent of union members organized has dropped.

In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s autoworkers organized into the United Auto Workers (UAW) through a wave of sit-down strikes and pitched battles with local police and company goons. For almost two generations autoworkers defined what a good job was: relatively high wages, health and retirement benefits and protection against unemployment. Unionized autoworkers set the pace for other workers to improve their standard of living in the years after World War II. But over the last 30 years, the concessions and give-backs by the leadership of the UAW have frittered away these gains. Plant closings and outsourcing have slashed the number of unionized autoworkers from almost 400,000 to less than 60,000 today.

Gregg Shotwell, a key leader of rank-and-file autoworkers was interviewed by Fight Back! shortly before the ratification of the Chrysler contract. The contract at Chrysler passed by a relatively narrow margin following an aggressive campaign by UAW officials.

New jobs and new ‘opportunity’, but at what cost? There isn’t much talk anymore about Honda’s new plant or the “new jobs” and the “opportunity” that Indiana was supposed to get from it. Indiana gave $141.5 million in incentives to Honda, which included tax credits and abatements, training assistance and a promise to expedite the long-sought interchange upgrade at US 421 onto I-74. The Indiana plant will be Honda’s sixth North American plant.

Interview with Rank-and-File Leader Gregg Shotwell

Fight Back! interviewed Gregg Shotwell, a key leader of the rank-and-file movement that is growing inside the United Auto Workers. A worker at the Delphi auto parts plant in Cooperstown, Michigan, Shotwell helped organize the mass meetings of autoworkers that took place over the past two months. These meetings led to the formation of the rank-and-file organization, Soldiers of Solidarity.

After decades of concessionary contracts, rank-and-file United Auto Worker activists have worked tirelessly the last two months resisting attacks on auto parts workers at Delphi Corporation.

The workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago are calling on supporters in Chicago to join them at a protest at Bank of America, 231 S. LaSalle today, Wednesday, December 10 at 12:00 noon.

Around the country, organizers and leaders of the immigrant rights movement are discussing and making plans for another round of May 1 protests. Last year millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets on International Workers Day. This powerful upsurge, which extended for many months, defeated legislation that would have further criminalized undocumented workers in the United States.

Immigration promises to be a major issue for the rest of the congressional session and into the November elections.

May 1 marks International Workers Day around the globe. Here in the U.S., immigrants’ rights coalitions called for a National Day Without An Immigrant, advocating no work, no school and no buying to show the impact that the immigrant community has. Millions of undocumented workers and their supporters took to the streets.