Truest statement of the week II

A battle is looming. At midnight on September 14, one month from now, the four-year labor agreements covering 155,000 General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers in the United States will expire.
Autoworkers are determined to fight. They have endured decades of falling wages and attacks on benefits, which escalated following the 2008 crisis and the restructuring of the auto industry under Obama. The assault on workers has produced record profits for the auto companies and Wall Street investors.
The auto companies are determined to make US autoworkers bear the brunt of a new restructuring of the global auto industry that has already eliminated tens of thousands of jobs around the world. Amid growing signs of recession, the companies are intensifying their attacks on jobs, wages and working conditions. They are out to reduce workers to the status of contingent laborers totally at the mercy of the employers.
They have no intention of bowing to the demands of the workers. Instead, they intend to use the downturn to blackmail workers into accepting even more brutal concessions. GM reportedly wants temporary workers to make up half of its US factory workforce, while Ford wants to gut supposed “gold-plated” health benefits and end what Forbes calls the “last vestige of the quasi-socialism that dominated the US auto industry for 100 years.”
The conflict, however, is not between the companies and the United Auto Workers. That pro-company organization is mired in a corruption scandal that has sent top officials to jail for taking bribes from Chrysler to push through the sellout contract in 2015.
The battle is between autoworkers in the US and internationally on the one side and the transnational corporations and their corporatist “trade unions” on the other.

-- Jerry White, "US autoworkers on collision course with the companies" (WSWS).