Toledo Jeep worker Antonio Gaston: The latest victim of America’s industrial slaughterhouse

Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore and I express our deepest condolences to the wife and children of Antonio Gaston who was killed at Toledo Jeep Complex Wednesday. We demand a full investigation of his death, carried out under the oversight of a committee of trusted rank-and-file workers.

There is no doubt, however, that Antonio is the latest victim of America’s industrial slaughterhouse, which subordinates workers’ lives to capitalist profit. This is the brutal system that Harris and Trump, both corporate-controlled parties and the UAW bureaucracy defend.   

Since the signing of the 2023 UAW labor agreements, hailed by UAW President Shawn Fain and US President Joe Biden as “historic” and “life-changing,” autoworkers have been subjected to a savage attack on their jobs and working conditions. Thousands of part-time and full-time workers have lost their jobs, and those remaining face increasingly deadly conditions. 

At Ford, 46-year-old Tywaun Long Jr. died of a heart attack on April 17 because of exhausting hours and speed up. Now, Antonio Gaston’s name has been added to the long list of autoworkers, including Steven Dierkes, Danny Walters, Catherine Pace and Daulton Simmers, who have been sacrifice on the altar of corporate profit. This is not limited to auto industry. Just a few miles from the Jeep plant, the two young brothers, Ben and Max Morrissey, were killed in an entirely preventable explosion at the BP Husky oil refinery in September 2022.   

Now, Fain and his PR department think they can fool workers with their phony grievance writing campaign to “enforce the contract” and force Stellantis to “keep their promise” to reopen the Belvidere plant. But it was precisely the sellout agreement backed by Fain & Co. that gave the auto corporations the green light to destroy tens of thousands of jobs. 

Workers cannot rely on the UAW bureaucracy, let alone Harris and Trump, to protect them. Instead, workers must expand the network of rank-and-file committees in the factories so they can assert the power of workers on the shop floor over job safety and conditions. In March 2020, workers at Jeep, Warren Truck, Sterling Heights and other Stellantis plants shut down the industry with wildcat strikes because the UAW and management kept production running as Covid was spreading throughout the factories. 

As Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker who ran as a socialist candidate for UAW president against Fain, said, the right to a safe job, and the right to a secure and good paying job, can only be won through the collective action of the rank and file in opposition to the UAW apparatus.

This struggle must be guided by the principle that workers’ social rights take precedence over corporate profit and private capitalist ownership of the giant corporations, which have been built up through labor of generations of workers. 

The SEP calls for the unity of autoworkers around the world in a common fight against job cutting and deadly conditions, and for Stellantis, Ford, GM, VW and other giant corporations to be transformed into public industries, collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class.