Germany: Protest of Workers of Mercedes Suppliers

Featured image: Demonstration of the workers of suppliers for Mercedes, with the Red League participating. Source: Dem Volke Dienen

German imperialism continues to find itself in a deepening economic crisis with no way out. This is also the case in its automobile industries.

The plans of companies like Mercedes show clearly that their plan is to offload the costs of the crisis onto the shoulders of the masses, as a recent article by Dem Volke Dienen analyzes.

As such, Mercedes has been threatening the workers with abandoning factories in Germany should the yellow union leadership not give into their demands to increase exploitation. These measures also affect the large chain of suppliers for Mercedes, as is the case in Baden-Würtemberg where their bankruptcies have cost hundreds of jobs per month.

Another big concentration of these suppliers can be found near the Mercedes factory in Bremen, in a project called “Hansalinie”. Dem Volke Dienen has reported that the pressure of the workers there has led to the yellow union feeling pressured to include the workers of these suppliers in a day of action, in which they also mobilized 3,000 workers of the Mercedes factory itself in a separate demonstration. Meanwhile, the workers of the suppliers have considerably worse working conditions and pay, but still the yellow union IG Metall found ways to limit the mobilization, excluding for instance the logistical workers.

The demonstration of the workers of the suppliers still managed to mobilize around 500 workers, many of them migrants. When the leaders of the yellow union tried to use this demonstration to ingratiate themselves with the mayor of Bremen, by giving him a stage at the end of the demonstration, this only served to show his separation from the masses, as evidenced by a comment of a worker, which Dem Volke Dienen shared, saying that you could see in his face that tomorrow the mayor would not even remember what he had told the workers.

According to Dem Volke Dienen, activists of the Red League were present at this demonstration, witnessing the pitiful show of the mayor, saying: “It is probably due the majority of the migrant workers not even knowing who the man is, because of his irrelevance, that ‘Bovi’ was not booed. He may have had the stage to himself once again – he was standing up there, protected by the bureaucracy of the union, but below, in the midst of the masses, the flag of the Red League was flying next to the ones of the yellow union.”