Today's New York Times (Tuesday Dec 9th) reports that the owner of the Chicago plant where the sit-in is taking place was, in fact, packing up and moving the plant to a cheaper location, in Iowa. He started another company named "Echo Windows LLC".
So there you have it. The race to the bottom. No doubt, this new plant will be non-union. And even if the workers win, all they will get is the vacation pay that is owed them -- they won't get to keep their jobs.
This sit-in strikes me as an historic act of defiance, and it is getting support from broad sections of the community in the midwest. Even President-elect Obama made a statement today in support of the workers. I hope that he takes a page from FDR's book and goes one step further, sending Michelle and maybe the girls over to the plant with some food and blankets. Could you imagine?
In 1937, the Flint Sit-Down strike was the key action in the great unionization drives of the 1930s. The UAW always regarded the Flint Sit-Down as its "genesis" event.
Of course, this is not a repetition. History is not so neat and clean. Who knows where this will end? But it is important that working people are taking stronger and more defiant means of saying -- enough! And the bailout of the big bankers and Wall Street hucksters seems to have thrown many of the parameters of the fight for economic justice out the window. Working people are now saying -- if they can get bailed out, what about us?
So, what about us? What can actually be done to help working people in this situation? They don't need vacation pay -- they need their JOBS!
I say, let the workers take over the plant and run it, in the form of a worker cooperative. Put aside a section of bailout $s to help workers in plants that are closing form cooperatives and take operational and financial control over the closed plans. Why, maybe a form of this idea could even be applied in the auto industry.
I realize, of course, that this is only a bare-bones idea, but I am putting it out there as a "meme." As the nationalization of AIG shows, there is nothing sacred about our current forms of economic ownership and control.