The elimination of profit-sharing checks by Stellantis is a slap in the face to workers who have created billions in wealth through their labor. It means bills unpaid, homes at risk, cars repossessed, and plans postponed.
While UAW leaders try to shift all blame to management, they cover up their own role in negotiating the 2023 deal, which tied workers’ income to profit-sharing formulas controlled by the company.
What is needed is a real fight, not more collaboration with management. When anger at Sterling Heights threatened to spark action, Local 1700 leadership intervened to block a wildcat strike and ordered workers to keep production going and work harder building more trucks as though they were company foreman.
Profit sharing is presented by employers and union bureaucrats as a way to “include” workers in the fruits of production. In reality, it is a political and economic device that deepens exploitation, subordinates our livelihoods to corporate management, and undermines independent class struggle. In reality, all wealth is created by the labor of workers. The corporate owners create nothing, yet they siphon off the lion’s share of the wealth created off our backs and leave us crumbs.
The reality is the corporate owners need us, but we do not need them. What workers need is not profit sharing but workers’ power and workers’ control to wrest back the concessions stolen from us and guarantee every worker a decent wage, shorter working hours and a secure retirement.
Workers can secure their needs only through organization and collective action. Power must be restored to the rank and file by building committees across plants and linking up with workers in Mexico, Canada and internationally, so that strategy and demands are decided democratically on the shop floor.
