Collective bargaining for good American jobs

The UAW recently reached agreements with Chrysler Group LLC, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. These agreements will create thousands of good jobs for American workers. Working with the UAW, these companies agreed to bring production jobs back from Mexico, China, Japan and other nations – welcome news for communities from Tennessee to Indiana, Missouri to Michigan.

These agreements illustrate the critical and positive role that collective bargaining plays in strengthening our middle class.

When the UAW national bargaining teams sat down with management, their primary goal was jobs:

• To protect the jobs of our members.

• To bring jobs back to the United States.

• To create new jobs.

In total, the three agreements will add more than 20,000 new direct jobs to the economy, with 2,100 new jobs at Chrysler, 6,400 jobs at GM and 12,000 at Ford, including bringing off-shored manufacturing back to the United States from Europe, Mexico and China.

The new investments in American plants and the transfer of work from factories abroad to our own communities will lift local economies during these difficult times.

In recent years, the right wing has demonized the process of collective bargaining. While targeting public sector workers, they have also attacked the right of private sector workers to organize and bargain. The right-wing view is that bargaining is destructive to our economy or even “un-American.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Collective bargaining created the American middle class in the first place, and if we are to restore our middle class, it will be through guaranteeing every worker’s right to organize and thereby expanding bargaining throughout our economy.

Collective bargaining is the vehicle through which working people have a voice at work. Too often without countervailing input, executives make decisions based on short-term profit seeking, not on what’s best for the company or our nation, in the long term.

No one has a stronger self-interest in the success of the company than the workers. CEOs come and go – often with lucrative golden parachutes. Management pursues their own career advantages. Stockholders buy or sell to make the most money. But the workers are here for the long run and have the most at risk if the company fails.

Through collective bargaining, workers have a check and balance on short-term corporate profit-seeking. This balance benefits not only workers, but also our communities, and even the company’s shareholders.

Collective bargaining works. The UAW has demonstrated that by giving workers a voice, we can create jobs, rebuild the American manufacturing sector and restore the American middle class.