Building solidarity in auto: across the shop floor, across the borders

In early April, President Trump declared “Liberation Day,” announcing sweeping tariffs aimed at reshoring manufacturing in the United States. The theory behind this move is that a strong U.S. industrial base is necessary to ensure effective capitalist competition with other great powers, namely China. While this gets sold as a way to strengthen and protect U.S. jobs, this is manifestly false.

Trump’s policy also boosts the racist divisions this administration has exploited toward their overarching goals. They not only want people to believe the reason we don’t have adequate healthcare is due to undocumented immigrants, but they also want us to think the reason we are overworked and underpaid is because of some trick that the Chinese government has pulled. 

While Trump’s flip-flopping on the specific execution of these tariffs along with pending litigation in the courts has made this topic a challenge to track, the nationalistic racism being peddled by his administration has dangerous potential. It is particularly troubling when major labor organizations, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW), publicly supported the tariffs. 

While this interview with Jessie Kelly – a skilled trades mold maker and member of UAW Local 160 in Warren, Michigan – took place in late March, the topic and issues discussed are still very relevant to how socialists should think about this question. 

Dennis Kosuth: President Donald Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on cars and car parts coming into the United States starting on April 2. Why do you think the Trump administration is doing this?

Jessie Kelly: I personally think the Trump administration is doing this as a way to make good on the promises he made to people while he was campaigning. I don’t think the tariffs are a good-faith effort to follow through on those promises.

One of the tactics that we’ve seen, in both times he has been president, is that he creates chaos. He makes it look like he is doing something productive and isn’t a status quo politician. He is hoping that the people who already support him will deepen their loyalty by seeing these big moves being made.

DK: In the factory you work at, where was people’s interest in what Trump was saying during the campaign? Did it make sense to some of those that you work alongside?

JK: Yeah, actually, it made sense to others. Trump is an accidental consequence of the Democratic Party abandoning the working class. This left a gigantic gap in politics. Workers are looking for somewhere to turn, even if turning to Trump is irrational.

They wanted somebody who appeared to be speaking their language and talking about their struggles. Trump did a really successful job in both of his campaigns in appealing to the working class and making it seem like he was the answer for workers. It is insane and bizarre that a billionaire was able to be the one to set up this narrative. This shows how much more political education we have to do in this country.

DK: In that vein, could you say more about what people perceived the argument to be from Democrats in the lead-up to the last election?

JK: For a long time people have felt like there was a lot of lip service given by the Democratic Party.

There’s a lot of: “We’re gonna help the working class,” but then you see Biden imposing contracts on the railroad workers.

Most people are struggling to get by, and they think that their tax money is being misused because they’re not seeing anything benefit them or coming back to them.

So when Trump came out and said, “We’ll cut taxes for the working class,” people see that as a way to get more money in their pockets. Again, a lot of political education needs to happen.

People felt like what the Democratic Party was doing wasn’t actually generating money into their pockets. People therefore thought, let’s try the Trump avenue. That’s what it’s really about. People have been struggling, and they continue to struggle more and more, every single year.

People’s wages have been stagnant in this country. It’s interesting because many of the people I work with, who ended up voting for Trump, actually want the same things I do. At the end of the day, we’re in disagreement of how to get there. There was a point where we were in agreement with how to get there, but then they felt let down by the Democratic Party. Instead of exploring other options, they went with Trump, who they thought was going to be the answer.

DK: I think you make a really important point about the irony of billionaires coming to save people who actually work for a living and how little sense that makes. What do you see as a solution in terms of what workers should be demanding, fighting, and organizing around to get the things that we deserve regardless of the two parties and what they’ve put forward?

JK: The best way forward for all of us is creating class consciousness. We have to realize that the ultra-wealthy who are buying politicians, or running for these political offices themselves, are not the people who are actually going to make legislation or enact policies that are going to be beneficial for us.

They are using algorithms and narratives to try and appeal to us. At the end of the day, they’re not actually going to do the things that help workers. They are not one of us. What we need is increased class consciousness and we need to come together on what we deserve.

The unequal distribution of wealth in this country isn’t fair and isn’t working for the majority. The people that aren’t ultra-wealthy need to start actively coming together, organizing and working in collective action. We must make the wealth in this country more proportionate so people aren’t struggling to get by, and people aren’t dying because they don’t have healthcare.

If you are in a union or not, you shouldn’t have to fight this hard for healthcare in this country, it should be a right. The only path forward is for us to come together as a class and fight the upper class and the ultra-wealthy, as they are stealing from us.

DK: To continue in this vein, Trump recently made an edict that unions representing Federal government workers are not going to be recognized and their collective bargaining powers will be taken away. It seems like unions are all under attack, what are some things that unions should be doing in response?

JK: Even though we are not Federal workers, we need to see this as an attack on all of us. We need to take it personally, because if they are coming for the Federal workers today, they will be coming for the rest of us tomorrow. They are testing how much they can get away with.

We are seeing the deportations of people who legally live here, on green cards and other statuses, and these deportations by ICE are really cracking down on activists and people who are showing dissent. This is all setting the stage, and what they’re doing is seeing how far they can push the line before people start rising up.

It’s Federal workers today, and it’s every worker tomorrow. They are just picking the low-hanging fruit to see if they can get away with it, before climbing higher.

Only three months into this administration, it’s very clear that Trump is waging a war against unions and against workers. I hope more people start to realize this because we can’t actually beat it, until we recognize it.

It’s very evident and the writing is all over the wall. He disbanded the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], took away our rights, and now we’re seeing him come for collective bargaining. At the end of the day, this is a corporate man, a business owner. We’ve seen him union busting, and he was bought by Elon Musk, who is also guilty of union busting.

We know what they are capable of. We know that they are immoral. Paralysis is not going to help us, it’s not going to make unions stronger, and it’s not going to make the working class stronger. Paralysis will only allow them to gain more wealth and power.

DK: Moving on to how unions are responding to this administration, I noticed that the UAW called Trump’s tariffs a “victory” for auto workers. What’s your response to that statement?

JK: I personally think it is a very shortsighted and knee-jerk reaction, that will never end in a real victory.

Even if Trump’s 25 percent tariffs result in more manufacturing jobs, it will take years for people to get those jobs. Even if more jobs are the result, that’s still not an actual victory for the working class. What will happen when these companies go unchecked? The bosses will just find the next way and place to exploit workers.

So the only way that you can actually win, a true victory, is if you organize every single place they go to. Tariffs are not going to guarantee anything. If they build jobs here, bring jobs back to America, they are not going to go to areas that pay livable wages.

They are going to go into the South where they don’t have unions, where they pay people $13 or $14 an hour, and they will create shell companies or third-party companies.

The economy will still be in the same place, where the argument is that wages are not competitive, and we’ll still be running a race to the bottom for the lowest amount of money. The tariffs are not going to help anybody, it’s not a victory, and it’s shortsighted to call it that.

DK: I’ve asked others why the UAW has taken this position and one response is that they have a long history of supporting tariffs. People also mention that many UAW members supported Trump, and for the union president to go against their long-standing support for tariffs, and to say they’re not going to work with Trump could cause internal friction. What is your response to those assertions?

JK:  It would be a mistake to discount how many UAW members voted for Trump. However, it’s not something we can actually study or ever know because our UAW leadership didn’t even ask us that question.

The International Executive Board made the decision on who to endorse, and we don’t actually have a good gauge or know where our membership was on that issue. We also failed, in my opinion, to do political education around this issue.

We failed to raise the question; do we go to Trump or Harris? There was never a question of; what if the UAW doesn’t endorse anybody? Or, what if we create a labor party in America? What does it look like if we tried to endorse a third party? There was never even a survey of what top priorities or issues are.

Why has the leadership not done this? I think that the leadership won okay contracts in 2023, better than we’ve seen in a long time. Then we’ve seen retaliation from the corporations who moved jobs to Mexico. The corporate narrative was, “If you want to fight for better contracts, we will lay you all off.” We didn’t have the right answer to that because we haven’t been organized in the right way for decades.

DK: The history of unions in general, and the UAW specifically, when it comes to tariffs or protectionism, could be interpreted as a form of nationalism, an “America first,” type of politics.

There’s an unfortunate history of that in this country, such as with the murder of Vincent Chin. He was a Chinese man walking around a Detroit neighborhood in 1982, and came across two men, a supervisor at Chrysler and a laid-off autoworker, who took their racist hate out on him, thinking that he was Japanese, and beat him to death with a baseball bat.

What’s concerning to me is that we are tiptoeing towards those politics again, especially in Trump’s political environment. How do we reckon with this longstanding history that UAW has in terms of tariffs and protectionism?

JK: That’s a question I hope all UAW members start grappling with, asking themselves, and coming up with serious solutions around. It’s something we need to address and we need to address it quickly. It’s actually upsetting because it’s something that we’ve needed to address for thirty years now and haven’t.

What I would personally say is that there isn’t a real victory unless you have international solidarity. We are never gonna truly win until we achieve that because we’re dealing with international corporations and so they have to be met with international solidarity. And if they’re not, then all of these wins are just band-aids over cuts anyway.

How we handle it moving forward is that we need to get better at uplifting, supporting, showing solidarity to, and figuring out ways to organize every single place where these corporations are doing business.

DK: The UAW is an international union. It has relationships with unions in Canada and Mexico. Can you talk about how we can build international solidarity, and what are some of the challenges that we have to overcome, towards that end?

JK: One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen when it comes to the auto unions in Mexico is corruption. These are unions that prioritize working on behalf of the auto companies and who are not building power to fight against exploitation. There are a lot of mechanisms that we could use to stand in solidarity with the workers down there, to make sure that corruption is no longer happening.

But as a union, we never made a call to action or a political education campaign about the challenges that our brothers and sisters are facing in Mexico with their corrupt unions. Most auto workers don’t even know about that. They have no idea. They were never told about that.

They were just given a narrative that they are not competitive enough against these workers who get paid $3 an hour. It’s us versus them, not a narrative of what we can do to uplift them, to ultimately uplift ourselves.

We need to educate people on why empowering them also empowers us at the end of the day. People can follow that, when it’s laid out to them.

What they can’t follow—when they are working 70-80 hours a week to make ends meet— is we’re not competitive enough because others are willing to work for less.

Our brains automatically make them the enemy instead of making the corporation that is exploiting them, the enemy. The corporations are masters at this. We’ve even seen it in our own plants, every single day. It’s all about making sure that people understand this, and framing it in the correct way.

I started in General Motors as a Temp. I was the enemy to the other workers because I came in and I was willing to work for less. Was I actually the enemy? Absolutely not. It was the corporations that did all of this, and they were able to create this division. That had me come in for less, but I’m not actually the enemy.

We can see how it plays out on the shop floor and how divisive it is. Despite this, you still saw those people fighting for Temps in 2019 when we went on a national strike against General Motors. I had guys out there with 40-50 years of seniority who said, “I’m out here for the temporary worker.”

Once it makes sense to them, once they learn, they want to fight it. Once they get it, once it all starts clicking on who the real enemy is, they will stand up and they will sacrifice for somebody else.

DK: They used competition as an argument for NAFTA. The corporations wanted “free trade” for workers to compete with workers in other countries, as if that’s somehow going to benefit us. We’ve had thirty years of “free trade,” and what has that resulted in? A race to the bottom with everybody’s wages going down, while the rich got richer.

These tariffs pit workers across borders against each other. The argument is that we have to have less free trade, and “protect American jobs.” Just like with so-called “free trade,” tariffs also blur the class divide, furthering an illusion that we share interests with American corporations, not workers in other countries.

JK: Oh, 100 percent. It’s very clear that a big portion of Trump’s campaign was directed at making somebody the enemy and joining his supporters together. That has been a tactic of his forever. We’ve seen this when he said that Haitians are eating animals, we’ve seen this when he said that China created Covid. We see all of these ways that he tries to group people together and get strength through having a common enemy.

We’re seeing it now with these tariffs. The narrative is that the enemy is everybody that’s not in America. The enemy is Mexican workers, it’s fentanyl, it’s Canada. He gets power when he convinces you that everybody else is the enemy. When everybody else is the enemy and our allies start getting framed as the enemy, what does that lead to?

To me, it leads to just a dictator. If you believe that everybody but your leader is the enemy, that will lead to unchecked power, and that leads to very dangerous things.

DK: One final question: what can we do as unionists and activists to build international solidarity, fight the billionaires, and build an alternative to these politicians?

JK: We need to do things like this. We need to do interviews, we need to get everybody’s voice out there. We need to start highlighting the people who are talking about class struggle.

We need to work with people that we think we don’t agree with and have difficult conversations. I find so much common ground with somebody I would never have thought I actually have common ground with. At the end of the day, we relate more because we’re workers first, and then the political classification that we identify with.

I think that people are going to realize quickly that they’re actually workers first, and the class they are in is more important than if the person down the street happens to be transgender or gay. People are going to realize this quickly, as things get really bad in this country—and things are going to get bad.

People are gonna start shopping around for answers. Interviews like this, where people talk openly about their own struggles and their own opinions can set others on a different path, to explore different answers.

Things are going to get bad, and people are going to be searching for alternatives. We’re going into what they’re calling a “voluntary recession.” When things don’t get better three years from now, when there aren’t more good jobs offered, people will start to ask, what was that sacrifice for? It’s going to build resentment.

The silver lining is this could also build a lot of organizing opportunities. Opportunities for us to be able to actually make the kind of sacrifices that lead to better things to come for the working class.

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Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Diego Rivera; modified by Tempest.