Mobilize the working class to support the striking Dakkota auto parts workers!

As the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for vice president, I express my full solidarity with the nearly 500 striking Dakkota auto parts workers in Chicago. These courageous workers urgently need the support of autoworkers from throughout the region.

I urge Dakkota workers to organize rank-and-file strike committees, in order to mobilize the support and coordinate the actions necessary to win their fight. In particular, workers should appeal for and prepare solidarity actions with autoworkers at Ford, Flex-N-Gate, Tower, Lear and throughout the area, including a ban on scab-made parts.

The Chicago Dakkota workers launched their strike on August 7 after voting down a UAW sellout contract by 87 percent. The deal would’ve limited starting pay to barely above minimum wage, forcing workers to continue working two or three jobs in a daily struggle to survive. 

Dakkota workers are fighting a two-front war against both the company and the UAW bureaucracy. At the nearby Ford Chicago Assembly plant, which Dakkota supplies, the UAW has ordered workers to use the parts made by scabs that Dakkota has hired, generating widespread anger among Ford workers.

The administration of UAW President Shawn Fain is repeating the strikebreaking playbook it used against Clarios battery workers last year. Shortly after coming into office, Fain’s administration isolated and sabotaged the 40-day Clarios strike, refusing demands by Big Three workers for a ban on scab-made batteries. 

The strike at Dakkota takes place as the auto corporations are massively escalating their assault on workers’ jobs globally. Last Friday, Stellantis announced it was permanently laying off up to 2,450 workers at the Warren Truck plant in suburban Detroit, nearly two thirds of the factory’s workforce.

The job cuts are the direct result of the UAW’s betrayal of Big Three workers last year. Fain and the bureaucracy used bogus “stand-up strikes” to keep the vast majority of workers on the job and only call out a handful of plants. Later, they shut down the walkouts before even holding a vote or showing workers the contracts. 

The contracts have given the companies a free hand to carry out thousands of layoffs and mass firings of temporary workers—which UAW officials have subsequently admitted they knew would happen.

Dakkota workers are fighting not just for themselves, but for all workers. At the same time, the struggle for higher wages must be combined with the defense of the right to a job, as well as the right to adequate time off and a healthy and safe working environment. The rights of the working class must supersede the companies so-called “right” to profit. To fight the global attack on jobs workers must coordinate their fight against the transnational corporations through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).