Will LehmanWill Lehman hosted a powerful online meeting Sunday, September 20, as the assault by the global automakers accelerates with the destruction of as many as 100,000 jobs by Volkswagen. In addition to Lehman, the panelists included a striking worker at the National Steel Car plant in Hamilton, Ontario; a worker at the VW subsidiary MAN in Norway; and a GM worker from Silao, Mexico, where workers refused to work overtime in solidarity with the 2019 GM strike in the US. Other speakers on the panel included a GM Flint Assembly worker, a Detroit worker at Flex-N-Gate, and leaders of rank-and-file committees at the Nexteer Automotive plant in Saginaw, Michigan, and the US Postal Service.
In his opening report, Lehman outlined his program to abolish the UAW bureaucracy and transfer power to the workers on the shop floor through the building of rank-and-file committees in every factory, university and workplace. To fight the transnational corporations, he said, workers had to reject the nationalism promoted by UAW President Shawn Fain and the UAW apparatus and unify their struggles with workers in Canada, Mexico and throughout the globe.
“The reality is we’re being pitted against each other internationally and this idea of nationalism has failed,” Lehman said. “It’s time for a new political perspective and it needs to be led. That’s what the rank-and-file committees are doing regardless of borders. Any autoworker who walks around their own plant can see that parts are made from all over the world. So, the reality is we can’t be separated from each other and succeed in any kind of struggle.”
“With Will’s help, we need to take the power back onto the floor and stand together and fight for better wages and working conditions, including workers all over the world,” a veteran Nexteer worker said. “Workers in Canada, Mexico, Germany, we are all facing the same struggles.”
