An organization that accepts a government ban on the most elementary form of workers’ resistance demonstrates thereby its fundamental opposition to the interests of the working class. The UAW’s complicity in the so-called “bailout” of the auto companies, with its provisions for impoverishing the workers and stripping them of their right to strike, is the inevitable outcome of the entire policy of the UAW and the American trade unions as a whole and the culmination of their trajectory over many decades. To argue, under these conditions, that the UAW bureaucracy presides over a genuine workers’ organization is to engage in self-delusion or deliberate deception.

For three solid decades the UAW has concentrated its efforts on suppressing the resistance of autoworkers to the destruction of jobs, living standards and working conditions, under the banner of labor-management “partnership” and “Buy American” chauvinism. It has deliberately sought to extirpate all remnants of class consciousness among its members, in order to facilitate its ever closer integration with corporate management and the government. In the figure of Gettelfinger—a man who cannot even conceive of an independent role for the working class, and who views the world entirely from the standpoint of a junior partner of the auto bosses—one sees a concentrated expression of the degeneration and transformation of the UAW.