Chronique d’un temps qui a tant de mal à passer, Octobre 2025/01
“Sire, l’industrie se meurt… Sire, l’industrie est morte !”
La France, qui fut la première patrie de l’automobile et l’une des héroïnes de cette extraordinaire aventure industrielle, est en passe de rendre son dernier souffle. Il ne s’agit pas là de prophétie, mais d’une réalité concrète. Le triste exemple de la chute du groupe Stellantis, entreprise porte-drapeau avec “Renault Group” (!), révèle plusieurs choses.
En premier lieu, tenter de faire porter la charge de la bérézina actuelle au seul Carlos Tavares, patron remercié il y a quelques mois et parti avec des gratifications astronomiques après avoir magnifiquement prospéré sur la bête, est d’une rare malhonnêteté. Non que ledit Tavares soit emprunt de sagesse et d’humanisme, mais plutôt parce que ce patron-là, homme intelligent, assidu et exigeant pour lui-même autant que pour ses équipes, a très vite compris la volonté de l’actionnariat qui l’avait choisi : gagner un maximum d’argent, en gagner même toujours et encore plus, ce qui est le leitmotiv de la finance capitaliste américaine représenté depuis 2021 par John Philip Jacob Elkann, petit fils de Giovanni Agnelli, bâtisseur de l’empire Fiat qui finit par absorber toutes les marques transalpines, ou presque.
En prenant la tête du groupe Stellantis, né de l’union entre Fiat FCA (Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles) et le groupe PSA (Peugeot-Citroën), Elkann a fait conduire par Tavares une politique d’hyper profitabilité qui a produit deux effets à court terme : d’abord un gain de rentabilité industrielle réalisé au détriment des règles fondamentales de la qualité (achats, production, développement), ensuite l’incohérence de la stratégie européenne de rachat (Opel/Vauxhall, pas une mauvaise affaire si seulement “on” avait voulu développer), de création (DS, une ineptie marketing ruineuse) et de relance de marque (Maserati, Lancia : des labels émotionnels rendus vides de sens), tout cela dans un contexte de captation systématique de trésorerie. Ou comment impressionner banquiers et investisseurs en multipliant des bilans mirobolants et des projets bavards, joliment repeints par des experts financiers et des communicants zélés.
Le board des actionnaires – au premier titre desquels les rejetons de la famille Peugeot – s’est régalé au cours de ces dernières années, au détriment de la cohérence et de la qualité perçue qui caractérisait les fleurons composant Stellantis. Aujourd’hui, l’ensemble des marques partageant les plateformes et les solutions motrices du groupe ont à déplorer un taux de panne jamais rencontré dans l’histoire de références comme Peugeot, Citroën ou Opel. Les ateliers débordent de véhicules pris en charge “sous garantie”, le coût effectif des réparations et remplacements devenant ainsi une menace directe pour l’équilibre des comptes.
Mentionnons également que Stellantis subit, comme tous les groupes présents sur le territoire sinistré de la non moins sinistre Commission Bruxelloise (la fameuse “grosse commission”), les conséquences du “Green Deal”, diktat écolo-schwabien condamnant les motorisations thermiques à ne plus être vendues en 2035. Cette mesure, basée sur le volet carbonophobe de la farce réchauffiste, a conduit à l’adoption du modèle électrique, modèle qui s’avère être catastrophique à plus d’un titre : incapacité à produire des batteries 100 % européennes compétitives et efficientes, problèmes technologiques (autonomie des véhicules, sécurité et recyclabilité des cellules) et coût final du véhicule électrique prohibitif eu égard aux capacités financières du cœur de marché.
Quelle leçon tirer de cette gestion catastrophique ? Aucune, bien sûr. Contentons-nous de comprendre que les capitalistes ne sont pas des capitaines d’industrie. Ils n’ont aucun attachement à l’outil qu’ils épuisent sans état d’âme. L’UE a créé les conditions de la désertion, de l’abandon. Dès lors, pourquoi investir sur un territoire géré par des malades mentaux et des idéologues autistes ?
Tout cela, Sire, et plus encore, justifie ces prolégomènes. La France se meurt au milieu d’une Europe en sursis. L’État français, à la fois obèse et indigent, ne décolère pas devant son frigo vide. Comment se remplira-t-il la panse demain ? Quelle invention terrible émergera de son cerveau, seul organe maigre au sommet du cloaque graisseux, qui pressurera plus encore cette valetaille tiermondisée qui erre en hardes autour de lui ?
Cela, personne ne le sait. La seule chose dont on peut être certain, c’est que nous avons quitté le champ des inquiétudes pour entrer de plain pied sur le vaste et nébuleux territoire du chaos.
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Seven thousand more UAW members just walked off the job, expanding the strike to two more plants. Twenty-five thousand autoworkers are now o
Seven thousand more UAW members just walked off the job, expanding the strike to two more plants. Twenty-five thousand autoworkers are now on strike, and the walkout could continue to escalate if the Big Three don’t budge in negotiations.
[UAW president Shawn] Fain announced that Stellantis would be spared this time. The union had been expected to strike all three companies, but, said Region 1 director LaShawn English, three minutes before Fain was scheduled to go on Facebook Live, the UAW received frantic emails from company representatives.
[Note: Love that for the UAW. Also laughing so hard. Three minutes before the next round of strikes were annouced!!]
According to Fain, Stellantis made “significant progress” on cost-of-living allowances, the right not to cross a picket line, and the right to strike over product commitments and plant closures. “We are excited about this momentum at Stellantis and hope it continues,” Fain said...
“See You Next Week — Maybe?”
“These guys wanted to go out a long time ago,” said Cody Zaremba, a Local 602 member at the Lansing GM plant after the news broke that his plant would be joining the strike. “We’re ready. Everybody, truly, I believe, in the entire membership. They’re one with what’s going on.”
Five thousand workers at thirty-eight parts distribution centers across twenty-one states have been on strike since last Friday [September 22, 2023], along with thirteen thousand at three assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri who walked out on September 15. (See a map of all struck facilities here.) ...
The UAW is now calling on community supporters to organize small teams to canvass dealerships that sell and repair Big Three cars and trucks. On Tuesday, the union issued a canvassing tool kit with instructions, flyers, press releases, and talking points.
In negotiations with Ford and GM, autoworkers have clinched some important gains. Among them is an agreement by both companies to end at least one of the many tiers in current contracts, putting workers at certain parts plants back on the same wage scale as assembly workers. The top rate for Big Three assembly workers is currently around $32...
Ford was spared in last week’s escalation, because bargainers there had made further progress on gains for workers.
But today, the UAW once again called out workers at Ford and GM, putting some muscle behind its bold demands — a big wage boost, a shorter workweek, elimination of tiers, cost-of-living adjustments tied to inflation, protection from plant closures, conversion of temps to permanent employees, and the restoration of retiree health care and benefit-defined pensions to all workers.
-via Jacobin, September 29, 2023. Article continues below.
Keep Them Guessing
This year, for the first time in recent history, the union has played the three auto companies against each other with its strike strategy, departing from the union’s tradition of choosing one target company and patterning an agreement at the other two.
The stand-up strike strategy draws inspiration from an approach known as CHAOS (Create Havoc Around Our System), first deployed in 1993 by Alaska Airlines flight attendants, who announced they would be striking random flights. Although they struck only seven flights in a two-month period, Alaska had to send scabs on every plane, just in case. The unpredictability drew enormous media attention and drove management up the wall. Meanwhile the union was able to conserve its strength and minimize risk.
The companies miscalculated where the UAW was going to strike first, stockpiling engines and shipping them cross-country to the wrong facilities. Autoworkers relished the self-inflicted supply chain chaos on UAW Facebook groups and other social media platforms.
Nonstrikers’ morale on the factory floor has gotten a boost from rank and filers organizing to refuse voluntary overtime. With support both from Fain and the reform caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), workers have been encouraging each other to “Eight and Skate,” meaning to turn down extra work and decline to do management any favors.
Majority Public Support
A majority of Americans support the UAW strikers, and the Big Three have taken a PR hit since the strike began, according to a new survey conducted by the business intelligence firm Caliber.
“Eighty-seven percent of respondents told us they were aware of the strike,” Caliber CEO Shahar Silbershatz told the Intercept. “It’s clear the strike is not just causing commercial repercussions, but reputational repercussions as well.”
These reputational repercussions will only worsen...
"We Can Unmake It"
Fain didn't pull any punches in his speech... “That’s what’s different about working-class people. Whether we’re building cars or trucks or running parts distribution centers; whether we’re writing movies or performing TV shows... we do the heavy lifting. We do the real work. Not the CEOs, not the executives.
"And though we don’t know it, that’s what power is. We have the power. The world is of our making. The economy is of our making. This industry is of our making.
“And as we’ve shown, when we withhold our labor, we can unmake it.”
Canada subsidizies companies to stay in Canada while America
allows companies to grow and prosper.
Prime Minister Carney’s ‘Master Plan’ backfires —Stellantis Moves to USA After $15 Billion Deal.
Canada handed Stellantis $15 billion to secure EV battery production and protect auto sector jobs. But now, Stellantis is moving key production lines to the United States, putting another 3,000 Canadian jobs at risk.
I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
I know, I know, it's weird when the worst people you know are right, even when they're right for the wrong reasons: like, the "Intelligence Community" is genuinely terrible, pharma companies are murderous crooks, and Big Tech really does have a dangerous grip on public debate. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, is what I'm saying:
When conspiratorialists and reactionaries holler about how the FBI are dirty-tricking creeps who are framing Trump, it's tempting to say, "well, if Trumpists hate the FBI, then I will love the FBI. Who cares about COINTELPRO and what they did to Martin Luther King?"
It's a process called "schizmogenesis": forming new group identity beliefs based on saying the opposite of what your enemies say,
and as tempting as that is, it's extraordinarily foolish and dangerous:
It means that canny reactionaries like Steve Bannon can trick you into taking any position merely by taking the opposite one. Bannon's followers are even more easily led, so it's easy for him to convince them that we have always been at war with Oceania. The right has created an entire mirror world of "I know you are but what am I?" politics.
Anti-vax co-opts "bodily autonomy." Climate denial becomes environmentalism ("wind turbines kill birds"). Transphobia becomes feminism ("keep women-only spaces for real women"). Support for strongmen becomes anti-imperialism ("don't feed the war machine in Ukraine"). These are the doppelgangers Naomi Klein warns us against:
The far right has even managed to co-opt anti-corporate rhetoric. Culture warriors rail against "woke capitalism," insisting that when big businesses take socially progressive positions, it's just empty "virtue signalling." And you know what? They've got a point. Partially.
As with all mirror-world politics, the anti-woke-capitalism shuck is designed to convince low-information right-wing pismires into buying "anti-woke pillows" and demanding the right to pay junk fees to "own the libs":
But woke capitalism is bullshit. Corporations – profit-maximizing immortal transhuman colony organisms that view workers and customers as inconvenient gut-flora – do not care about social justice. They don't care about anything, except for minimizing compensation for workers while maximizing the risk those workers bear; and locking in and gouging customers for products that are as low-quality as can be profitably sold.
Take DEI, a favored target of the right. It's undoubtably true that diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives have made some inroads on correcting bias in hiring decisions, with the result that companies get better employees who would have been excluded without this explicit corrective.
However, corporations don't value DEI because they abhor their history of hiring bias. Instead, DEI is how corporate management demonstrates to workers that their grievances are best addressed by trusting corporate leadership to correct their error of their ways – and not by forming a union.
Before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, corporations would create fake "Company Unions" whose leadership were beholden to the company executives. These were decoy unions: they looked and sounded like unions, but when they negotiated with management, they were actually working for the bosses, not the workers.
This is more mirror-world tactics. They're the labor equivalent of the "crisis pregnancy centers" that masquerade as abortion clinics in order to fool pregnant people and trap them with endless delays until it's too late to terminate their pregnancies. Company unions get workers to trust in negotiators who are secretly working for the bosses, who emerge from the bargaining table with one-sided, abusive contracts and insist that this is the best deal workers can hope for.
Company unions were outlawed 90 years ago, and for decades, labor had a seat at the table, with wages tracking productivity gains and workers getting protection for discrimination, unsafe labor conditions, and wage-theft. Then came the neoliberal turn, and 40 years of wage stagnation, increased inequality, and corporate rule.
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Finally, finally, we have reached a turning point in labor, with public approval for unions at levels not seen since the Carter administration and thousands of strikes and protests breaking out across the country:
https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/
It's not just the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, either. For the first time in history, the UAW is striking against all the major automakers, and they are winning:
The automakers are getting desperate. Stellantis – Chrysler's latest alias, reflecting the company's absorbtion into corporate-human-centipede of global carmakers – has mobilized its DEI programs, trying to get marginalized people to believe that scabbing is a liberatory activity:
Stellantis calls each of its DEI silos a "Business Resource Group" (BRG): there's a "Working Parents Network," an "African Ancestry Network," "Asians Connected Together," a "DiverseAbilities Network," a "Gay & Lesbian Alliance" and more:
The corporate managers who lead these BRGs have established a scab rotation for each subgroup, calling on members to cross a UAW picket-line at a Michigan Parts Distribution Center run by Stellantis subsidiary Mopar:
Each BRG will pick a specific day of the week/weekend to volunteer as a team. Help continue to be the RESOURCE the BUSINESS can count on! Stellantis needs your help in running the Parts Distribution Centers (PDC) to ensure a steady supply of parts to our customers while negotiations continue. Working Parents Network has identified Friday, October 13 as WPN’s BRG Day at the PDCs!"
Now, these BRGs weren't invented by marginalized workers facing discrimination in the workplace. They come from literal union-busting playbooks produced by giant "union avoidance" firms that charge bosses millions for advice on skirting – or breaking – the law to keep workplace democracy at bay. All the biggest anti-union consultancies love BRGs, from Littler Mendelson to Jackson Lewis. IRI Strategies touts BRGs as a way to "union-proof" a business by absorbing workers' grievances in a decoy committee that will let them feel listened to.
BRGs, in other words, are the Crisis Pregnancy Centers of workplace discrimination. They're a Big Store Con, a company union dressed up as corporate social responsibility.
Now, let's not pretend that unions have a sterling record on race and gender issues. Giant labor organizations like the AFL had to be dragged into racial integration, and trade unions have sometimes been on the wrong side of anti-immigration panics:
But unions have also been the most reliable way for people of color and women to win better workplace treatment. The struggle for racial and gender justice was fought through labor organizing. Remember that MLK's "I've Been To the Mountaintop" speech was given in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis:
Black organizers have always been militant labor organizers. Labor Day commemorates the victory of the long, hard-fought Pullman strike, where Black workers brought one of the most powerful companies in America to its knees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
And women have always fought for gender justice through the labor movement: the New York shirtwaist strike is the Ur-example, when women-led unions fought thugs and scabs on icy New York streets:
It's no surprise that labor activism, anti-racism and feminism go together. Since the earliest days, the labor justice struggle was also a social justice struggle. To learn more check out Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor:
The vanguard of today's labor surge is Black, brown, female and queer. Without a union, workers who face discrimination are on their own, hoping that their bosses will voluntarily do something about it. Black workers in Tesla's rabidly anti-union shops face vicious racism, from slurs to threats to violence. Without a union, they have to rely on the shifting whims of an Apartheid emerald mine space-Karen for relief, or hope for help from the NLRB or a class-action lawyer:
The far right isn't wrong when they holler that woke capitalism is bullshit. As with so many of their mirror-world causes, they've got a point, but only a limited one. The problem with woke capitalism is that it's no substitute for a union. The problem with relying on Business Resource Groups to fight racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia is that these struggles are all class struggles, and a BRG is never going to fight against the company that created it.
To understand how bankrupt woke capitalism is, conside this: Stellantis is calling on its "Working Parents Network" to scab this Friday. Stellantis is also being sanctioned by the Department Of Labor for discriminating against nursing mothers – the same "working parents" that the BRG is meant to protect:
Woke capitalism is just another kind of "predatory inclusion," like Intuit's campaign defending its "Free File" tax-prep scam, where they're claiming that ending this ripoff is racist because it denies Black families the right to be tricked into paying for something they are entitled to get for free:
When I learned about Intuit's wokewashing, I thought I'd found woke capitalism's rock bottom, but I was wrong. Stellantis's call for woke scabbing is a new low.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
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The temporary layoffs will impact workers at the Warren and Sterling Heights stamping plants.
COO cites new tariffs as reason
DETROIT – Just hours after the latest tariffs went into effect, Stellantis has announced it would idle plants and begin layoffs.
President Donald Trump’s 25% tariff on imported vehicles was put into action at midnight, Thursday, April 3. The White House has also said it plans to place tariffs on key auto parts and components.
