Previously existing restructuring pressures

Metalworkers across the automotive industry are experiencing restructuring impacts as great as any time in history, glaringly magnified by the global economic crisis. The process of automotive transnational companies' (TNCs) globalisation has led the world's productive capacity to outpace growth in demand. That demand has been constrained by insufficient purchasing power and unequal development, and is now dramatically undercut by consequences of the financial meltdown.

In the two decades preceding the crisis, the industry's map and its workforce encountered unprecedented change as emergent countries became fully incorporated into the global market system. Throughout that period, employers continually pushed cost cutting measures. Not only through increased productivity of workers and more efficient methods to design and build vehicles but also through outsourcing, subcontracting and the substituting of precarious for permanent work.

While automotive TNCs prioritize adoption of standardized production and quality control systems meeting "global best practices", the upward harmonization of terms and conditions of work, health and safety and industrial relations have typically been treated differently. There has been a growing divergence between productivity gains on the one hand, and improvements in wages and conditions for many workers across the automotive global value chain on the other. TNCs that have established industrial relations with unions in some countries fail to respect worker and trade union rights in others.

Fuelling and facilitating this dynamic over recent decades has been a mix of market fundamentalist policies, the financialisation of economic activity and rules of international trade and investment favoured by TNCs. These have tended to exert a general downward pressure on wages, conditions and social protections in many parts of the world. Income and wealth inequalities have reached extremes not seen since the 1920s, moving the world in a direction opposite to authentic sustainable development. In the same vein, the global environmental challenge to produce employment-enhancing cleaner vehicle and fuel technologies as well as revitalize transportation systems has too often been given a back seat.