General Motors headquarters in Detroit [AP Photo/Paul Sancya]
As Americans prepare for the holiday season, US corporations are celebrating with a surge of layoffs that is part of a continuing offensive by the capitalist ruling class against the working class.
Thousands of jobs are being axed in the auto industry alone, including 3,600 layoffs at Stellantis, and hundreds of workers at Ford as the company slashes production of electric pickup trucks. General Motors has recently announced over 1,300 job cuts at its Lake Orion and Lansing Grand River plants, and 900 more cuts at GM Cruise, a subsidiary focused on autonomous “robotaxis.” It is likely that cuts at the Big Three will cascade throughout the auto supplier plants.
These mass layoffs come only weeks after the UAW rammed through new contracts at all three companies, which the union bureaucracy claimed were “historic” and “game-changing.” These claims have now been exposed as a sham. The bureaucracy knew these cuts were coming and told workers nothing about them in order to ensure the passage of pro-company sellout deals.
Thousands more jobs are being slashed in the retail sector, as working class families are having to restrict spending due to high prices and stagnant wages. And in the railroads, years of historic layoffs continue unabated a year after Congress banned a national rail strike. Union Pacific has announced 1,300 “furloughs,” which will likely be permanent, reducing its maintenance of way workforce by nearly half from only a few years ago.
This is part of a global phenomenon. Layoffs are also underway in Germany, particularly in the auto sector, where German tire maker Continental is planning thousands of cuts. Parts supplier Bosch recently announced it would eliminate 1,500 in southern Germany.
The latest round of losses caps a year of a jobs bloodbath. Through November, US corporations cut nearly 700,000 jobs, more than double the rate last year and the highest since the first year of the pandemic. A major center has been the tech industry, which eliminated nearly 260,000 jobs compared to 165,000 last year, according to layoffs.fyi.
The result has been a rapid decline in living standards. New census data, reported on by CBS News, shows that child poverty has doubled from 2021 to 2022, while overall poverty has increased to the highest level in a half century. Meanwhile, median household income declined 2.3 percent to $74,580.
This was not the result of panoramic “market forces.” It is the result of deliberate policies aimed at using unemployment to beat back modest wage growth, which had risen last year to a little over 4 percent. Although wage increases were far below the decades-high 9 percent inflation mark hit last summer, the capitalist class considered even slight raises intolerable, while commentators warned of “unrealistic” expectations on the part of workers that their wages should keep pace with inflation. Eroding living standards have been a major driver in the rise of strikes and social discontent in the working class.
The spearhead of the ruling class policy was the decision to continuously raise interest rates, beginning early last year, from near-zero to 5.33 percent today, the highest in nearly a quarter-century. This was consciously modeled on the “Volcker Shock” of the 1980s—which wiped out millions of jobs, especially in manufacturing—in response to the labor militancy of the 1970s, which saw the biggest wave of strikes since the end of World War II.