General Motors has again idled its flagship electric vehicle plant in Detroit, temporarily laying off the 1,300 workers on the last shift left running at the factory. The layoffs are part of an escalating wave of job cuts, carried out with the complicity of the UAW bureaucracy, throughout the auto industry.
Workers at Factory Zero are not responsible for the economic crisis being exacerbated by Trump's criminal war against Iran, nor for the shortsighted decisions of management, which are primarily concerned with enriching stockholders and corporate executives.
Workers at Factory Zero and other plants should build rank-and-file committees that would enforce a zero-layoff policy and the return of all laid-off workers to their jobs. When production is slowed, workers' hours should be cut with no loss of pay. Automation, artificial intelligence, and other technologies should be used to lessen the burden of work and sharply increase workers' living standards—not throw them into the streets.
GM is spending billions on executive salaries, stock buybacks, and its new headquarters in downtown Detroit while workers are thrown out of their jobs. The company had adjusted profits of $12.7 billion for 2025, following record profits of $14.9 billion in 2024. GM stock has risen approximately 55 percent over the past year and the company spent $6 billion on stock buybacks for their wealthy investors. Workers produced that wealth. They should not be sacrificed to further enrich shareholders.
The UAW apparatus has not called a single membership meeting, organized a single protest, or issued a single concrete demand to stop these layoffs. The bureaucracy's silence is not passivity—it is complicity.
The chauvinist nationalism of Fain and the UAW apparatus aligns them directly with Trump. By blaming "unfair trade" and pitting American workers against their brothers and sisters in Canada, Mexico, and around the world, the UAW bureaucracy functions as a tool of the very corporations that are destroying workers' livelihoods.
The fight of Mexican workers against the transnational auto corporations is our fight. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees is building the unity of American, Canadian, and Mexican workers against these corporations, and that is the only program that can actually defend jobs.
My campaign for UAW president is aimed not at a changing of the guard within the current bureaucratic apparatus but at transferring genuine power to workers on the shop floor. This campaign is about waging a relentless fight against capitalism, which subordinates every decision—what to produce, how to produce it, who works and who doesn't—to the needs of corporate owners. That has to end. The transformation of the auto industry, including the shift to electric vehicles and the use of automation and AI, must be placed under democratic workers' control and reorganized to meet social needs, not the further enrichment of wealthy shareholders. The squandering of trillions on war and destruction must end and society's resources used to raise the material and cultural conditions of all working people.
