Robert Dale reports on the growing trade union fightback at German car plants

If I wrote about every anti-militarist initiative going on in German trade union circles at the moment, you’d be looking at a book. Most are still quite small, their reach limited. No shame in that. But the current rumblings and grumblings from the big car plants seem to merit the ink and paper for a report.

We are talking words and action, rearmament and job cuts. A series of resolutions and a burst of industrial action, some of it spontaneous and led from below.

As far as I can see, it started with an anti-war resolution passed unanimously by all 300 shop stewards at the Ford plant in Cologne (two abstentions). The text is sharply worded and pulls no punches. Under the title ‘No to the war economy – we’re not sacrificing our children for war!’ it criticises current talk about converting civilian factories to military production, warns against the reintroduction of conscription, and calls for a fight to defend all jobs (read the full text at ‘No to the war economy’).

Three aspects caught my eye. Firstly, the shop stewards represent the entire workforce, as the most elementary form of rank-and-file organisation. So they presumably feel confident that most of their colleagues are on board in some form or other.

Secondly, German car workers know they have their backs to the wall. After a string of strategic mistakes by their bosses, who missed the Electric Vehicle (EV) turn entirely, Chinese manufacturers are eating their lunch (breakfast and tea, too). Converting car plants to manufacture weapons is the only alternative in the broader public discussion, so it is especially heartening to see workers rejecting that en masse.

Thirdly, standing up to oppose the drive to war is no easy matter these days. The political pressure to stay silent is very strong, with all the big media outlets backing rearmament and giving short shrift to its opponents. So kudos to the Ford reps.

The shop stewards at components supplier ZF in Hannover passed a similar resolution in March, and in April the initiative was taken up by union activists at Volkswagen, with an open letter against military conversion. Their bosses are currently talking about another 50,000 redundancies and four plant closures.

Then in late June, shop stewards at Mercedes in Untertürkheim passed an even more bluntly worded resolution: ‘Enough! Protest, resistance, strike! The bosses want class war? They can have it!’ This was at a meeting of 70 delegates representing a total of 700 shop stewards, at a plant employing 12,500.

Their text speaks the language of class struggle: ‘It’s a full-blown crisis. And the bosses want to make us pay for it.’ They connect social and health cuts to increased military spending and explicitly criticise recent changes to basic benefits, which will ‘will force us to take any work, however miserably paid, after they have destroyed our own jobs’. In just 330 words, they say pretty much everything that needs to be said (read the full text at ‘Enough! Protest, resistance, strike!’).

In the past, this kind of resolution would have included an appeal to the political parties to do something, or a request to union leadership to organise a bit of protest. Seems the patience for that has run out. ‘We are not going to wait until someone asks us to protest. We are getting on with it!’

In the last week of June, Mercedes-Benz management announced that a particular bonus would not be paid until next year, and said that everyone is going to have to work more for the same pay. On the Friday morning (26 June) 500 workers on the early shift in Bremen walked out spontaneously.

A week later, on Friday 3 July, the early shift walked out for a couple of hours at all the Mercedes-Benz plants across Germany, about 33,000 in all. This was now official union action, backed by the leadership, and the stated demand seems to have been reduced to protecting jobs and defending the 35-hour week. It looks very much as though union leaders are being driven by pressure from below, running to get ahead of the rank and file.

Robert Dale lives in the Berlin region, where he has been active in socialist politics since the 1980s.