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I won’t add too much new about the union implications of the recent crushing victory by workers who voted by a 3-1 margin to vote for representation by the United Auto Workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’ve been a UAW member for 30 years and I’ve been through repeated cycles of anticipation, and the eventual heartbreak, of attempts to organize the so-called foreign “transplant” auto companies who set up shop explicitly in the South to evade unions. I held my breathe in the run-up to the vote, a little nervous about the bold predictions of a coming victory.
This vote was fantastic. And that is still true and tells us a lot even though the subsequent vote at the Mercedes plant in Alabama didn’t produce a win.
What I want to write about briefly here is a political aspect that hasn’t gotten much attention, at least in the traditional media and even in the “alternative” media.
To set the stage, I want to take us back in time, a bit over 30 years ago. To be precise, November 17th 1993. That night, the House of Representatives was having its final debate on the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). I remember precisely where I was at that moment: the UAW’s Walter and May Reuther UAW Family Education Center in Upper Michigan (among my favorite just-discovered info nuggets about the Center: “The Douglas firs used for the massive beams and columns in the Center came from Portland, Ore.”)
After day-long conference sessions, many of us had gathered to watch the televised NAFTA debate, which has gone late into the night, at the center’s bar, Mazey’s (named after Emil Mazey, a former union secretary-treasurer). The TV was bolted on the wall. I remember looking up at the screen as the debate drew to a close. David Bonior came to the podium in the well of the House.
Bonior represented what was at the time the 10th Congressional District, which spanned Macomb County, one of the more conservative-leaning, Democratic-held districts in the country. He was the majority whip of the House. He was the highest-ranking Democrat in Congress publicly opposing NAFTA.
His fierce fight to defeat NAFTA was politically notable mainly because he was standing in opposition to his own party’s president who was making an all-out push to get the deal approved— “all out push” meant resorting to legal bribery of various members of Congress (“legal” meaning “if you vote for NAFTA, we will put this project in your district or fund this X special thing you want”).
Bonior’s 7-minute speech is a classic, about as sharp, brilliant, emotional, inspiring and compact sketching out of the reality of class warfare as you will ever hear on the House floor. I’ve made a clip of it here for folks.
For those who would prefer the text, here is the entire speech that is well-worth the quick read [I’ve very slightly corrected the text—e.g., capital letters—where official transcription was wrong]:
Tonight this house will have a chance to earn its name. We alone were founded to be the voice of the people. Never in my memory have I seen so many forces arrayed against those of us who have opposed this agreement. Pundits have derided us, editorial boards have railed against us. The Fortune 500 has opened its corporate coffers to campaign against us. And the government of Mexico has spent $30 million to lobby us.
All because we have dared to stand up and say that this NAFTA is a bad deal.
It will cost jobs.
It will drive down our standard of living.
It will lock in place a Mexican system that exploits its own people and denies them the most basic political and economic rights.
Mr. Speaker, we are not alone tonight. The working people who stand against this treaty don't have degrees from Harvard. They don't study economic models. Most of them have never heard of Adam Smith.
But they know when the deck is stacked against them. [emphasis added]
They know it's not fair to ask American workers to compete against Mexican workers who earn $1 an hour. That’s not fair trade. That’s not free trade.
We stand here tonight with people who can’t cut deals when they are a few dollars short. To them, NAFTA isn’t some economic theory, it’s real life. When jobs are lost these are the people who have to sell their homes, pull their kids out of schools, and look for new work. Those of us who take these concerns seriously have, today on this floor, been called fearmongers, afraid to take risks with no vision of the future.
That is an insult to the working families of this country.
These are the people, Mr. Speaker, who show their faith in this country every day.
They take risks every day, that people who make their fortunes in the stock market would never understand.
They know we live in a global economy. They know we need new markets. They know we need a free trade agreement with Mexico.
But they also know that the work of America is still done by the people who pack a lunch, who punch a clock, and who pour their heart and soul into every paycheck and we can’t afford to leave them behind.
Mr. Speaker, tonight we are their voices, and we must stand with them. We must stand with the autoworker in the Midwest who can’t compete with any worker in the world, he can compete, she can compete, but they’ve got to have a job so they can compete.
We stand with the aerospace workers in California who have seen their jobs leave for Tijuana, and they demand to know why we will pay higher taxes to send our jobs to Mexico. We stand tonight with the church leaders who have documented torture, corruption and human rights abuses in Mexico and ask us tonight why this treaty does nothing to stop that.
We stand with the workers in the maquiladora who hope that when the American companies move to Mexico, they would have the opportunity to lift their families out of poverty, but, instead, find themselves mired in a river of toxins. And, then, when they try to raise their voices and protest, their own government silenced them.
We are their voices tonight, and we are not alone. For standing with us in this chamber tonight are all the Americans who came before us, who had the courage to fight against the odds and against the powers that be for a better future and a better life.
The men and women who struggled in the sweatshops for a dime a day and who one day found enough strength to stand up and say ‘enough’, the farmers who faced drought and depression and foreclosure and who could have thrown it all away --but found the courage to say ‘never’. The farmworkers who saw the children struggling to work 12 hours a day to work our harvest of plenty, who had the courage to stand up and say ‘no more’.
The men and women who crossed the bridge at Selma, who stood firm in the face of dogs and hoses and nightsticks and when they were told that this was not the time to fight for justice, they responded ‘we shall not be moved’.
Those are the people who stand with us tonight. Their voices -- their voices echo throughout this chamber, and we must not turn our backs on all they fought for. We must not turn our backs on all that was earned through the toil and the tears and the courage of our parents and grandparents. We must move forward.
This vote is more than about money and markets. It’s more than about tariffs and free trade.
It’s about basic values.
It’s about who we are as people , what we stand for as people.
It’s about the dignity of work. [emphasis added]
It’s about the respect for human rights. It’s about democracy.
Mr. Speaker, if we don’t stand up for working people in this country, who is going to?
If we don’t insist that the Mexican people that through their government let their own people earn a decent wage, who will? If we don’t stand up for democracy and human rights in our trade agreements, then, what does this country stand for?
We didn’t fight the Cold War just so we can exploit new markets. We did it for something larger than ourselves. We did it to advance the cause of freedom. and that’s what this vote is all about. We have come too far, and we have sacrificed too much in this country to turn the clock back. This NAFTA is not the best we can do. We can do better. I urge my colleagues vote for the future. Vote for our jobs. Vote for human rights and democracy and say no to this NAFTA.
I am not going to embark on a detailed 30-year review of what transpired because of the vote. Just a few bullet points:
NAFTA squeaked through that night 234-200. And, a year later, Republicans won a smashing election victory, notching a net gain of 54 House seats that gave Republicans the majority of the popular vote in Congressional races for the first since 1946, and ushering in the so-called “Gingrich revolution”.
To this day, I argue that the NAFTA vote played a significant role in the 1994 Republican win. The labor movement, boldly and with great honor, put every ounce of its energy into defeating NAFTA, making the argument to union members throughout the country that NAFTA was an existential threat to their livelihoods. Union members, especially those in the industrial “heartland”, heard that message—and, then, watched as a Democratic president locked arms with Wall Street and corporate America and used brute political force to ram through NAFTA.
Bonior’s speech, and the broad coalition arrayed against this travesty, did an important thing: he made clear the opposition wasn’t to trade itself, as the elite media editorial boards claimed. It was to THIS KIND OF TRADE. As I’ve written countless times, humans have engaged in trade from the time we’ve walked upright. But, the rules of trade, and who benefits, matter.
“Free trade” has always been a marketing phrase; it actually doesn’t exist, at least in the theory conjured up in the 19th Century by David Ricardo. I’ve read NAFTA and other similar deals—in their hundreds, and often thousands of pages with appendixes. Every single one of the NAFTA-like deals are the opposite of free trade, which, if it was a Ricardo-theory style “free trade”, could be written in two pages that simply removed all tariffs. Instead, NAFTA and its ilk are very carefully laid out corporate managed trade with the main objective to protect capital, and, especially, intellectual property rights for industries like Big PHARMA.
NAFTA was just a symbol. Truth be told, global corporations didn’t need NAFTA or its subsequent offshoots. Those trade deals do help oil the system a bit—a system that is based on one thing: the search for the lowest wage possible and, if possible, actual slave labor.
Because NAFTA was just about setting rules of the economy—rules favoring the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
It was…amusing?… to read the COVID-era hand-wringing about “supply chain” problems fueling inflation—and virtually no discussion, at least in the traditional, or even “alternative” media, how the entire supply chain system (the system in which NAFTA-style trade deals operate) is fundamentally about exploiting seas of humanity working for substandard, slave wages who lost their meager wages when thousands of factories shut down. Or, worse, people died in droves from COVID because they were too poor to either stay away from work, could not afford medical care (and vaccines were in short supply because of the greed-driven drug companies) or lived in packed sheltering where social distancing wasn’t an option.
Intentionally, the above is very broad-brushed because I want to hurry up to the current times. NAFTA was a symbol of the capitulation of a big hunk of the political world to a set of ideological policy ideas that would hurt working people:
So-called “free trade”;
Deregulation (you happy with high airline fares?);
Tax cuts for the wealthy;
The religious celebration of “small business”
Of course, each idea on its own is not new. It’s the way in which they all have become interlinked together within both dominant political parties. Tax hikes on the wealthy under Democrats never breach a hard ceiling—even though the economy is minting a bevy of millionaires and billionaires who are making out like bandits. Health care costs, in particular, are draining pay checks, and sucking out dollars from wage increases at the bargaining table, but the idea—the rational economic idea—that we have to have a national, Medicare-For-All health plan (like all normal countries) can never overcome the loyalty (and campaign contributions) to the profit-driven insurance and pharmaceutical industries. And on and on.
So, fast forward…to Tennessee.
Tennessee. Donald Trump won Tennessee in 2020 with 60.7 percent of the vote. He won every county save three (two of the three counties Biden won include the two urban centers of Memphis and Nashville) of the 95 counties in the state.
He won Hamilton County with almost 54 percent of the vote. The city of Chattanooga sits in Hamilton County where the Volkswagen plant is located.
So, how does one explain the a UAW victory with 73 percent in a place that in the past has not been kind to union organizing, and in the standard political analysis is tinged “red”?
It actually isn’t a mystery.
A good paycheck is not red.
A good paycheck is not blue.
It’s only the color of the bills that get paid because a person earns a decent paycheck.
A decent paycheck that reflects the work she or he puts in, whether it’s in the private or public sector.
When people say the system is broken, that’s not exactly right.
The system works just fine for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. It works exactly as they and their ilk have designed it. It works exactly as they demand from political leaders.
The various political operatives, consultants, party leaders, aided by the dolts in the traditional media, wring their hands over endless polls, studies or analysis trying to figure out why “working class” voters are voting a certain way. To be sure, race, gender and other very important issues can’t be just shoved to the side.
But, it’s pretty simple:
The system is broken for every other person who is not rich.
Over there is the boss, the CEO, the owner, the politician who is making money off your labor. It’s all flowing one way.
Wonder why people are angry and fed up with the political system? Here’s a clear example: if the minimum wage matched productivity over the past 40 years, it would stand at $23-$25-an-hour, not the breathtakingly immoral $7.25-an-hour. And $25-an-hour is just a floor to build on: the prevailing wage for a licensed electrician in the county I live in, without calculating health and pension benefits, is $53-an-hour.
Virtually every issue we confront comes back to the broken economic system and the robbery of the last half century, the draining of money from peoples’ pockets into the hands of a small elite.
Houselessness? That isn’t the fault of the people who end up on the streets. It’s the almost predictable result of pay checks not covering the rent and land speculation by private equity funds who buy up vast tracts of real estate.
The auto workers in Tennessee gave us an answer to all that Red vs. Blue dichotomy: give us a vision and a doable strategy, and, hell, yes, we will rise up. And do it together.
When your paycheck isn’t fair and doesn’t pay the bills, the division between “rural” America and “coastal elites” is not even relevant
Yes, the more recent UAW loss at the Mercedes plant in Alabama was a setback—but that tells us when a company runs an ugly anti-union campaign, it won’t be easy to overcome fear.
The Volkswagen victory will be just the beginning.
