Laid-Off G. M. Plant Worker Attacks Company's 'Ideology'

A spokesman for the Committee for a Militant United Auto Workers last night called for formation of a nationwide caucus to protest the recent layoffs at General Motors assembly plants across the country.

The speaker, Ruth Ryan, who describes her caucus as a "rank and file group" whose goal is to "overthrow the bureaucrats who run the unions," is one of 500 women formerly employed in the General Motors plant in Fremont, California that laid off half of its 5000 workers early this year.

Ryan, addressing a crowd of about 50 at a forum of the Spartacus Youth League in Boylston Hall, said she supports the union's "seniority" method of laying off workers, but attacked its implementation which she said was grossly unfair to women.

Last In, First Out

General Motors fired early this year all workers in her plant who had been employed by the company under nine years. Since women were first admitted to work for the company in 1968, the maximum any woman had worked was six years.

The plant has reverted to its all-male composition, she said.

"The company runs a reactionary bourgeois ideology with the intention of keeping workers quiet while exploiting them," Ryan said. "The company wants to get rid of the [seniority] system, so they can play one worker against another. The more you ass lick, the better you do."

Ryan described the auto industry's strategy of "exploiting labor" by forcing large numbers of employees to work overtime, glutting the market, and then laying off workers as "seasonal cyclical secession." She said that 40 per cent of all auto works in the U.S. were laid off this year.