Deere Declares “All Options on the Table” After Workers Defeat Second UAW-backed Contract - World Socialist Web Site

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Deere declares “all options on the table” after workers defeat second UAW-backed contract - World Socialist Web Site: 

Excerpts:

The arrogance of the company is based on four decades in which its cost-cutting measures went unchallenged as it relied on the UAW to suppress the resistance of the working class. Deere and the entire ruling class, moreover, see the strike as not just a challenge from one set of workers. Any retreat, they fear, will send a signal to other workers and encourage the growing strike movement that is already underway.

The ruling class is facing an extremely unstable economic situation, which is exacerbated by the strike wave by workers who are fighting to restore past concessions and secure wage increases to counter the impact of rising food, fuel and other living expenses.

Deere—which counts on its corporate board current and former top executives at Royal Dutch Shell, Boeing, Cargill, Dupont, Verizon and the investment firm that handles the personal fortunes of billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates—speaks for the entire ruling class.

The revolt against the corporatist unions and growing strike wave threaten to reverse, as one financial analyst said, an “environment that has reigned” for nearly half a century, which “caused revenues to flow away from workers toward capital (i.e., investors).”

In a tweet earlier this week, former US Treasury secretary and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, who engineered the halving of newly hired workers’ wages during the Obama-Biden administration’s restructuring of the auto industry in 2009, denounced the restoration of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) stolen from Deere workers in 2015. “Those serene about inflation should ponder the fact that the new John Deere contract has reinstated previously dropped cost-of-living allowances,” he wrote.

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Workers in the US and around the world are not just fighting individual employers, but the entire capitalist system. This means the growing strike movement of the working class must be fused with a socialist program aimed at transforming giant corporations like Deere into public utilities and restructuring global economic life on the basis of a scientific and democratic plan to meet human needs, not corporate profit.