There’s a legislative move a foot in the Congress to ease the pension obligations of manufacturing corporations by billions of dollars. That’s not surprising, given the class loyalties of the two parties that set the legislative priorities of this nation. What may take our readers aback is that the United Auto Workers also supports the bipartisan legislation.

According to the New York Times (May 6), the union “wrote a letter in support of the provision…apparently in hopes that the money that companies saved from pensions could be used for higher wages.” In other words, the union is taking the position that the past pension contributions from the auto moguls and the earnings from those contributions surely reduced wage increases and medical benefits that otherwise would have gone to the union’s members.

When a contract is typically negotiated the parties agree to the rough cost of a wage and benefit package and then argue about how to parcel out that cost to wages, medical benefits, pension contributions and the like. How to do that can be contentious. For example, an employer may want more money to go for wages in order to attract younger workers, while a union may want a greater pension contribution to satisfy higher seniority members. Or the employer may want better pensions in order to entice older workers to stay on the job longer, while the union may be under pressure from younger workers to get them more take-home pay in order to provide for their growing families.

While the variations in how the labor costs can be distributed are numerous, one thing is crystal clear; whatever the cost of the package the employer and the union finally agree to, the employer is contractually bound to pay that cost (barring mid-contract union concessions, or bankruptcy). Put another way, the negotiated cost of future wages, medical benefits and pension contributions (and their earnings) is money that belongs to the workforce to be paid over the life of the contract, and the life of the retirees.

So what the UAW officialdom is doing is promoting a law that would allow bosses to get their hands on money that unions won in past negotiations. There’s a word for that, of course, and the word is “outrageous.” If, as is claimed, the corporations that will benefit from the proposed law are paying too much into their pension trust funds, the equitable thing to do is to return to the workers that amount, perhaps in the form of higher wages. After all, “a deal’s a deal.”

It’s not clear if other unions are backing the UAW’s support of the legislation that’s sure to benefit the auto corporations that the union will negotiate a new contract with later this year. What couldn’t be clearer is why the UAW is throwing it weight behind the passage of the bill. The auto companies are under weighty competitive pressures; their rate of profit is falling. To revive their traditional rate of profit the auto firms need to squeeze more profit from the labor power of their work force. And they require the help and support of their workforce’s union to put over their program of raising profits.

The auto union has helped the auto bosses so often before, it’s now part of the union leadership’s song and dance. In fact the UAW is proud of its partnership with the auto bosses, as a reading of its magazine, Solidarity, makes clear. Through the years, the auto bosses have reduced the size of their unionized workforce, by imposing automation and speedup with the active collaboration of the UAW bureaucracy. The union’s latest decline, revealed in an annual report to the Dept. of Labor, that the union lost ten percent of its members in 2002, down to 638,772 from 701,818 the year before. (The Canadian autoworkers split from the UAW in 1984, in order to save their jobs from the concessions negotiated by the union’s central leadership in Detroit, rightly saying, “You don’t need a union to go backwards.”)

It doesn’t take a cynic to see that the proposed pension law concession takes place just before new contract talks may begin in September; it amounts to a giveback to the bosses before negotiations have even officially begun. The Times article says that billions of dollars are at stake. It should be noted, however, that not only UAW members will have lost heavily, but all other workers with hard-won union pension plans will have also been robbed if this latest swindle succeeds. In other words, all labor officials that don’t speak out against this huge rip off will be collectively guilty of being accessories to grand larceny!