Lessons of the Audi Strike

The January-February Audi strike has been the most important workers struggle in Mexico in recent years. The main lesson of this strike is that victory was possible, but to win it needed a different leadership, armed with an anti-imperialist strategy counterposed to that of the union bureaucracy and the populists who refuse to challenge the imperialists. The Audi workers confronted one of the most powerful imperialist monopolies in the world: Volkswagen Group. This German conglomerate profits from the superexploitation of the cheap skilled labor of Mexican workers, rooted in the subjugation of Mexico at the hands of the imperialists. Therefore, the Audi strike had to be conceived and organized as a battle attacking the source of the exploitation of the auto workers, i.e., imperialist oppression, which squeezes not only them but also the entire country. The strike showed that to advance the class interests of the proletariat as a whole requires a program that links the struggle for national emancipation with the fight for workers power.

A victorious strike would have advanced the interests of the workers as well as the struggle for the national liberation of Mexico. This strike sharply posed the need to confront the horrible working conditions that exist in Mexico, particularly all throughout the imperialist-owned auto industry. It constituted a golden opportunity to transform an economic struggle in an isolated plant into a battle against the imperialist plunder of the country, to establish the basis for building an industrial union, to challenge Mexican president AMLO's (López Obrador) “social peace” and to punch the imperialists in the gut. This is the criteria to determine whether the outcome of the strike was victorious. In the aftermath, it is impossible to observe even a modest step in this direction.

López Obrador declared that the strike was successfully negotiated for the workers, since they achieved a 7 percent direct wage increase and a 3.2 percent increase in benefits, higher than the company's first offer but lower than what the union originally demanded. Similarly, part of the left is hailing the result as a victory. The triumphalist assessments of the populists and the left conceal the fact that the union leadership undermined the strike at every step. It is true that the workers wrested from the bosses a little more than the paltry initial offer and that the bosses did not manage to inflict on them a decisive defeat. Nevertheless, the results of the strike are contradictory. It is the responsibility of communists to draw the lessons of this struggle and bring them to workers across the country to prepare for the battles ahead.

What was it that led a workforce that was highly motivated at the beginning of the strike—and which two weeks later voted massively against the bosses' offer—to accept an agreement that fell short of their initial demands a few weeks later? The main reason for this turnaround was that the workers feared that they would be crushed and get nothing if they continued their strike. This fear was justified. The perspective of the bureaucracy—which is based on affecting the imperialists as little as possible and not confronting the government led by the Morena party—is a strategy for defeat. With the state and the imperialists brandishing the threat that the strike would be declared illegal, and pressured by the bureaucracy to accept their sellout agreement, the rank and file ended up demoralized. Emboldened by the outcome of the strike, the bosses have laid off workers and postponed the date for the next contract review. The union's position relative to the imperialists, López Obrador and his government has been weakened.

The same conditions that weakened the strike remain today. For example, the bosses mobilized the temporary workers as a counterweight to the permanent workers who wanted to continue the strike, offering to extend the temps' contract for 12 months if they voted in favor of the company's proposal. The bureaucracy facilitated this division by ignoring the legitimate demands of the temporary workers. The result is that the temps now feel less represented by the union, while the rank-and-file workers resent and blame the temps for taking the side of the bosses. This division can only be in the interest of the imperialists.

Our intervention in the strike was a real, if modest, attempt to offer a program of action to the Audi workers to win, exposing how the entire strategy of their leadership did not have this purpose. The way the union bureaucracy organized the strike—with porous picket lines, without transportation for workers to man them, without a strike fund, without a struggle to organize the unorganized, without any attempt to extend the strike to the VW plant or to mobilize the combative peasants and students in Puebla, etc.—aligns with AMLO's populist-nationalist program. From the beginning, the strike was planned to reach an agreement that would “benefit” both sides: the imperialists and the workers. This attempt to reconcile irreconcilable interests is at the heart of the populist program, which seeks not to scare off foreign investment, but to take advantage of it to develop the country, advance the interests of the national bourgeoisie and at the same time extract a few benefits for the workers and the oppressed, whom it counts on for support. On the ground, this means workers give up on their own aspirations and submit to the wishes of the imperialists and their local agents.

To organize a successful strike and a broader anti-imperialist struggle requires challenging AMLO and his government. This is essential given the widespread illusions among the workers, promoted by the union bureaucracy, that the government of López Obrador was the instrument through which they would win their demands. The facts showed the true role of the populists, who claim to represent the interests of the Mexican people with their 4T (AMLO's Fourth Transformation, a populist program to develop the country) but betray and sabotage their struggles at every turn. In reality, AMLO pressured the Audi workers to restrict their demands by making them acceptable to the imperialists. López Obrador represents the interests of a propertied class and is conscious that an independent mobilization of the proletariat could threaten them. To protect these interests, he relies on the imperialists, to whom he is tied by thousands of threads. The task of the communists during the struggle is to systematically demonstrate how the current leaders of the proletariat inevitably waver and conciliate the imperialists, thus showing the need to forge genuine revolutionary leadership.

But this is not what the left did. Their intervention during the strike, including their speeches at the February 10 Caravan—in which organizations like the Grupo Internationalista (Internationalist Group, IG) and the Movimiento de los Trabajadores Socialistas (Socialist Workers Movement, MTS, sister organization of Left Voice) were prominent—did nothing to challenge the political dominance of the current union leaderships and the populists. While the IG and MTS did raise all kinds of criticisms of the SITAUDI union bureaucracy, they never exposed it for its main crime: its conciliation of imperialism and its lackeys, the national bourgeoisie. The calls of these groups to extend the strike, for a sliding scale of wages, for strike committees, etc.—correct in themselves—did not seek to forge a pole counterposed to the union bureaucrats but merely put forward combativity and solidarity. Thus, they ended up being a left-wing pressure on these treacherous leaders. This is the result of the inability of the left to offer an anti-imperialist strategy that fuses together the struggle for national and social emancipation.

At every step of the strike, the central task at hand was to forge a leadership capable of taking the union's struggle outside the bounds established by the bureaucrats and populists. Now, after the end of the strike, the task of forging a revolutionary leadership remains urgent. It is necessary for the workers to start forging union caucuses now with a correct understanding of what happened during the strike, with the purpose of throwing out the bureaucrats and taking over the leadership. The platform of these caucuses must guide union militants to strengthen their organization and prepare for the struggles to come. We propose the following basic points:

• Reinstate the workers fired after the strike!
• Union control of hiring and training workers! Organize the unorganized! Temporary workers must be given permanent contracts.
• Union control of health and safety! The union must decide about the conditions and tempo needed to work safely.
• For a national union of the auto industry! The existence of two unions at the Audi plant, in addition to a different union at VW, undermines their struggles, making them compete against each other, negotiating separate contracts, etc.
• Build strike funds! The lack of funds deeply affected the workers' confidence and was used by the bosses to blackmail and starve them into submission.
• Mexico out of USMCA! Repudiate the foreign debt!
• For a revolutionary workers party! AMLO and Morena have shown themselves to be a dead end. The workers of the countryside and the city must take the reins of this society into their own hands.