September 24, 2007 (LPAC)--In the first nationwide auto walkout in three decades, the United Auto Workers went on strike against General Motors this morning. GM -- what's left of it after years of plant closures and layoffs -- has been designated as the "lead company" by the UAW in its negotiations with the near-bankrupt "Big Three" U.S. automakers. The strike by more than 70,000 UAW members will idle tens of thousands more if it continues for several weeks, and as many as 100,000 workers in Canada, according to the estimate of the Canadian Auto Workers head Buzz Hargrove.

As we previously reported, in a slug, two weeks ago, the auto companies have been using the union negotiations to try to shed more than 30% of their total wage, retirement and healthcare costs per worker. The multiplicity of demands from the debt-desperate "Big Three"--eliminating the jobs bank; a two-tier wage system across all assembly plants; underfunding the healthcare plan that the UAW is supposed to take over from the automakers; loss of job security in plants--have combined to provoke the strike which the union clearly did not want.

In a statement issued early Monday morning, UAW officials said: "We're shocked and disappointed that General Motors has failed to recognize and appreciate what our membership has contributed during the past four years. Since 2003, our members have made extraordinary efforts every time the company came to us with a problem: the corporate restructuring, the attrition plan, the Delphi bankruptcy, the 2005 health care agreement. In every case, our members went the extra mile to find reasonable solutions.... This is our reward."

GM now has only about 73,000 hourly workers left in the U.S., at 82 plants and warehouses across the country. This physical economic collapse was warned about in LaRouche's 2005 Recreate Our Economy! Pamphlet, The U.S. Economic Recovery Act of 2006, and once again in his 2007 'A Table of Organization for U.S. Economic Recovery'.