I knew nothing about unions growing up. Then I met Philip Vera Cruz, the person who inspired me to join working class struggles. Vera Cruz, a farmworker and Marxist, had organized his fellow Filipino workers into the National Farm Labor Union. In 1965, his Delano, California local became the first to strike against the grape growers. Vera Cruz and Cesar Chavez would join forces to form the United Farm Workers Union after the growers tried to use Mexican workers to break the strike. The civil rights movement also radicalized me and other young Asian Americans. I wanted to organize with workers of color.

An ad visual for the Pontiac Firebird produced at GM Van Nuys

Next to housing, the high cost of health insurance probably worried workers the most, and at Van Nuys we negotiated full health benefits for both workers and retirees.

When did GM decide to close Van Nuys?

GM announced it would close Van Nuys in 1983. With Japanese cars hitting the US market, US car companies had cut production as demand for US cars dropped. Another reason for the shutdown: the benefits UAW workers had won. The health benefit turned out to be particularly costly. Other countries have national health insurance, so the notion of moving to Canada looked good to GM: Canadian workers would not make health benefits a contract issue. And México looked attractive too, with its wages kept at rock-bottom levels by union strongmen willing to take payoffs to sell out the workers.

But we weren’t going to give up good jobs easily. We formed a huge labor-community coalition, and we threatened a boycott of GM cars. We won such positive media coverage that even conservative legislators joined the fight to keep Van Nuys open. That mobilization would keep the plant going for another nine years.

But Van Nuys finally closed in 1992. For workers, a disaster. From $18 an hour, laid-off workers had to take jobs paying maybe $8, because Southern California’s major manufacturing plants had all closed. And, of course, the once-thriving community around the plant also took a nose-dive.

NAFTA was signed the same year that Van Nuys closed, and our Chevy Camaro production got relocated to Canada. My last task at the plant was packing up production equipment getting sent to a maquiladora in México. Did that equipment go to the new GM plant in Silao? That plant opened in 1996, so that’s very possible.

With companies moving abroad, workers often blame foreign workers for the loss of their jobs. That was horrifically demonstrated with the beating death of Vincent Chin.

In 1982, a couple of UAW workers killed Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man. They thought he was Japanese, and they blamed the Japanese for taking US jobs. They took out their misplaced rage on a random Asian man. My local sent a delegation to Detroit to stand with Chin’s mother, who was demanding justice for her son.

It's absolutely critical for union leadership to be clear about who is and who isn’t to blame for job loss. Unfortunately, the “Buy American” campaigns that the UAW has waged promote a false nationalism. These campaigns don’t educate the membership on how employers play workers of different nationalities off against each other. They don’t help workers understand the importance of unity across borders.

In 2019, Mexican GM workers and students sent messages of
solidarity with a GM workers walkout in the United States.

Where there will be a big change is going to come at the social level. Ousting sham unions in México will change the relationships of solidarity between US and Mexican workers. With sham unions out of the way, union workers will have the possibility of coming together across national boundaries to coordinate strategies that challenge corporate power. We can end the race to the bottom — and rise together!