I urge workers at the Dundee plant and throughout the UAW to demand the immediate release of the results of the MIOSHA investigation on the death of our brother Ronald Adams Sr. along with all digital machine logs, safety reports, and communications involving Stellantis, its contractors, and the UAW. As the resolution unanimously passed at the IWA-RFC public hearing stated: those responsible—from corporate executives to union officials and government regulators—must be held accountable for their role in the preventable deaths of Ronald Adams Sr., Antonio Gaston and other workers.
These deaths are not accidents but the inevitable product of a system that sacrifices workers for profit. Every day in America's industrial slaughterhouse, workers are maimed and killed on the job as corporations drive speed ups, cut safety and treat human life as if it is disposable.
With its continued silence, the UAW bureaucracy is demonstrating a callous indifference for not only the victim of the deadly working conditions, but towards his widow, and his many family members who have been effectively abandoned by the UAW in the family's search for answers. To workers Adams was the protector of the plant, but the UAW bureaucrats are demonstrating that in addition to being only a number to Stellantis, he was only dues revenue to them. Workers cannot forgive and forget what happened to our brother, and both the company and bureaucracy will be held accountable for their indifference for one of our own.
We cannot defend our lives and livelihoods while we are bound hand and foot by a union apparatus that stands against us at every turn. As it is presently constituted the UAW is a union in name only. It functions to isolate us, discipline us and protect the interests of a privileged bureaucracy that is in bed with the companies and the government.
We, as workers must collectively organize in defense of our social and democratic rights, including the right to a decent standard of living, secure jobs and safe working conditions. My campaign is not about replacing one bureaucrat with another but abolishing the pro-company UAW apparatus, transferring power to workers on the shopfloor, and establishing workers control over safety and production standards by rank-and-file committees, controlled democratically by workers ourselves.
