Stop the layoffs at Warren Truck!

The announcement that Stellantis plans to lay off 2,450 workers at Warren Truck Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit is a declaration of war on autoworkers and the entire working class.

The Socialist Equality Party and our election campaign call on all auto workers, and every section of the working class, in the US and internationally, to mobilize against this attack and prevent it from happening.

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For decades, the corporations have slashed hundreds of thousands of auto jobs, devastating entire towns and cities like Detroit, Flint, Toledo, Dayton, Kokomo and more. It is time the rank-and-file drew a line in the sand.

The SEP insists that workers have basic rights, including to a job, to a livable income, to a secure retirement, to healthcare, to a safe workplace—all rights that are under systematic assault. These rights can’t be won without struggle.

The corporate and financial oligarchy treats workers as so many interchangeable parts that can be cast aside in the interests of profit. Corporate profits in the US were $2.8 trillion in the last quarter of 2023, or $30.8 billion each day, while autoworkers confront increasingly unsafe conditions, speed-ups and mass layoffs.

The ruling class has given itself trillions of dollars in a series of bank bailouts. Trillions are spent on war. And they claim there is no money for anything else.

The fight for the rights of the working class requires organization. The Socialist Equality Party calls for the development of rank-and-file organizations, independent of the trade union apparatus, to unify all sections of the working class in a common struggle.

Time and time again the UAW bureaucracy has proven itself to be an enemy of the rank and file. The layoffs at Warren Truck and others throughout the auto industry are the direct product of the sellout contracts Shawn Fain and the UAW apparatus rammed through last year, in the phony “stand-up strike.” 

The Fain administration is totally illegitimate, elected with just 9 percent turnout due to the suppression of autoworkers’ votes, a fact recently established by a federal judge in Detroit who called the Biden administration’s refusal to investigate voter fraud alleged by rank-and-file UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman “arbitrary and capricious.”

And the fight for the rights of the working class requires a political offensive against both the Democrats and the Republicans, the two parties of the rich. 

The bureaucrats who lead the UAW are working hand in hand with Biden and Harris to slash jobs, while Trump, a fascist who wants to overthrow the Constitution and establish a dictatorship, blames workers in Mexico to divert attention away from his corporate backers.

The Socialist Equality Party will make the defense of Warren Truck a central plank of our presidential campaign, not only for the 2,450 workers who stand to lose their livelihoods but for the hundreds of thousands of autoworkers and other workers who have targets on their backs.

Jerry White and I will use our campaign to draw international attention to the attack on Warren Truck, but workers must understand that this fight must be waged by the rank and file themselves. 

Between now and October 8, workers must take matters into their own hands, establish their own lines of communication across shifts and across plants to take action in defense of jobs.

The ongoing jobs massacre shows that the working class must run society, not for private profit but to meet human need, which means good paying, safe jobs with democratic rank-and-file control over the process of production.