Will Lehman, is a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and a UAW (United Auto Workers) presidential candidate. He spoke to Ford India and Germany workers at a meeting on Sunday organized by the Workers Alliance of the International Ratings and Files Committee (IWA-RFC) against the plant shutdown.
Lehman emerged to advance an uprising by members of the UAW against a bloated union bureaucracy and to build power in the shops. His participation in international gatherings of Ford workers from threatened factories in Tamil Nadu, India, and Saarlouis, Germany, underscores that the basis of his campaign is the struggle for international unification of the working class against the onslaught of jobs and living standards by Ford and other transnational auto giants.
In each country, the greatest obstacle to a unified struggle is the nationalist and pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracy, which has imposed one concession after another in the name of the competitiveness of their “own” capitalist enterprises and the so-called “protection” of jobs. This policy only pitted one section of workers against another in a fratricidal race to the bottom and never saved a single job. In the United States, the number of hourly workers at Ford has fallen from 191,400 in 1978 to just 55,000 in 2021.
Lehman was invited to the meeting to talk about the importance of his campaign for the UAW presidency. He made the following statement, translated into German and Tamil.
“I am proud to be with you at this international workers’ meeting. My name is Will Lehman and I am a candidate for the position of international president of the United Automobile Workers union”.
“My campaign is not about getting a seat at the table of the trade union bureaucracy, but about opposing the UAW’s bureaucratic National Isolation Program. For decades, UAW officials have told us that our enemy is not the companies that attack our jobs and conditions, but our colleagues in other countries. Workers increasingly see that corporations and union bureaucracies are enemies, and that workers from other countries are our brothers and sisters, not our enemies.”
“I wanted to make workers aware of the much stronger position of the International Committee of Ranks and Rows Workers Alliance (IWA-RFC) and highlight the UAW’s betrayal of eliminating the idea of union reform through the replacement of one bureaucrat. by another. My campaign calls for the complete abolition of the union bureaucracy and the return of power to workers. I urge the formation of a rank committee.”
“In America, workers are fighting again, and many are striking for the first time in decades. In 2019, workers at Mack Trucks, where I work, went on strike for the first time in 35 years. The situation is very similar to that of many other auto workers in the United States.”
“Last year we saw a workers strike at Volvo Trucks New River Valley in Virginia. Thanks to the work of the Volvo Workers’ Ranks and File Committees, they were able to reach out to Volvo workers in Belgium, Canada and other countries for international solidarity. John Deere workers went on strike, auto parts maker Dana rejected their contracts and the UAW shifted their fight, and Kellogg’s wheat workers went on strike for weeks to abolish various wage rates. This year, auto parts workers tried to get into the fight at the Ventra plant in Evart, Michigan.
“American workers continue to find that the old ways of relying on unions are not enough to take over companies and win adequate wages and working conditions.”
“My campaign aims to show these workers a way forward through the international struggle. Ford workers in the United States must recognize that Ford workers in any other country are their allies. Ford is not an “American” belief, it is an international trust. If we are to succeed against it, the workers must fight it internationally; the same goes for parent company Mack Trucks, Volvo and others. My campaign will highlight the global nature of production. The only legitimate method of workers’ struggle is the method of international solidarity”.
(Article first published in English on 12 July 2022)
