PEN-L message, Re: [Pen-l] Can anyone explain this

In a message dated 5/1/2009 3:48:11 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx writes:

They're pathetic. If the workers weren't going to take the hit on
this, I'd say they deserve what they get for six decades of business
union hackery.

Doug
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Yes, the union leaders - Solidarity House, is pathetic.

Yes, they are hacks.

Yes, we are going to take the hit regardless of what solutions to the crisis are implemented.

There is no resolution favorable to the workers. The union had already agreed to reduce wages below that of the non-union auto workers of the South, despite all the figures to the contrary. In May of last year - one year ago, the American Axle workers, represented by the UAW, agreed in contract negotiations to a 50% wage cut of existing wage rates.

50% means "a half of something" or 50%. From $26 to $13.

OK.

This is a survival fight, exacerbated by the increasing revolution in the machinery of society, rather than a simple scattering of the points of production. This is a survival fight in which the auto workers as they are constituted cannot survive. The business unionism of the past 60 years should be treated as a historical artifact or historical form corresponding to a massive post WW II expansion of capital. By know means does this imply excusing the UAW for its brief periods of anti-communism, which practically came to an end in the early and mid 1970's.

I more than less remember the last 40 years of business unionism. Nothing we did could overcome this era of history.

The uppermost levels of the UAW long ago severed its open connections with communist groups, although some of these men and women are decent, militant, socialists of all stripes sprinkled with a few Marxists here and there. Strike action is our of the question, when a company is systematically shutting down all its plants anyway.

The union movement goes nowhere without communists, who today must demand their rights to distribute their literature and outlook. The union movement today is compelled to chart a course independent of the Obama administration or any administration or its death is ensured.

Our collective issues have to be placed at the table of the Constitutional authority.

Right now my brain is scrambled.

WL.