{"id":31262,"date":"2024-08-22T14:33:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-22T19:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=31262"},"modified":"2024-08-22T21:28:23","modified_gmt":"2024-08-23T02:28:23","slug":"53-year-old-stellantis-worker-antonio-gaston-crushed-and-killed-at-toledo-jeep-plant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=31262","title":{"rendered":"53-year-old Stellantis worker Antonio Gaston crushed and killed at Toledo Jeep plant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is holding a meeting this Sunday, August 25, at 3:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, \u201cFor global action to defend jobs at Warren Truck and around the world!\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

A 53-year-old worker at the Toledo Jeep Assembly Complex was crushed to death on the assembly line at the Ohio factory Wednesday afternoon. Antonio Gaston was a father of four children who was forced to move to the Toledo plant after Stellantis closed his plant in Belvidere, Illinois in 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A gofundme page<\/a> has been set up to raise money for Gaston\u2019s wife and children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just hours after the deadly incident, a quality inspector on the Jeep Gladiator line told local news station WTOL 11 that Gaston was killed \u201cwhere the chassis and the body comes down together, where all the parts from all the plants come together.\u201d He \u201cwas doing his job on break, and he just apparently happened to be in the wrong spot at the wrong time. The conveyor turned on; it\u2019s just terrible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs far as we know, the worker who was killed drove a tugger and was a stock worker,\u201d another Jeep worker told the World Socialist Web Site. \u201cThe line started moving while he was near the robot. There was no safety mechanism that would prevent the robot from moving if someone is near it, from what I\u2019m aware of at least. If there is, obviously it wasn\u2019t working.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pointing to the impact of job cuts at the plant, the worker added, \u201cStellantis has been eliminating hundreds of jobs within the plant. It started by eliminating team leaders and combining teams. They also eliminated a lot of quality jobs, and jobs they considered too \u2018easy.\u2019 But the same amount of work is required to build the vehicles. The additional work was added on to other jobs, which, of course, isn\u2019t good for safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is also immense pressure to eliminate down time and line stoppages, so people have to work faster to keep up. I\u2019ve worked on that side before, and the jobs are extremely over cycled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe worker who was killed was in stock, and they have eliminated jobs in stock also. It\u2019s a sad situation, he had a wife and children. Now they are without a husband and father. The company doesn\u2019t care about safety, only cranking out numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a very terrible, tragic, sad, accident,\u201d a veteran worker told the WSWS. \u201cHe may have seen something not right about the chassis, and tried to fix the situation, and got trapped.\u201d Asked if job cuts and pressure to meet production quotas have undermined safety in the plant, the worker stated \u201cyes\u201d emphatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A WSWS reporter called United Auto Workers Local 12 President Bruce Baumhower\u2019s office for more information about the worker\u2019s death and the impact of job cuts on safety conditions. Although the local union president\u2019s secretary took down the questions, Baumhower has not returned the call. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UAW bureaucracy is complicit in the deadly conditions facing workers. Stellantis and the other automakers have used the pro-company labor agreements signed by the UAW last fall to launch a savage job- and cost-cutting campaign. This has been spearheaded by Stellantis, which is seeking to shift the cost of its transition to electric vehicles by slashing thousands of jobs in Toledo, Detroit, Kokomo and other cities. Most recently, the company announced the layoff of 2,500 workers at its suburban Detroit Warren Truck plant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is well known among autoworkers and other workers in dangerous manufacturing facilities that \u201cno one dies on the company\u2019s property.\u201d This is because employers could face wrongful death lawsuits from surviving family members if such fatalities are connected to dangerous conditions of work and corporate negligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Warren Truck worker told the WSWS, \u201cWhatever happened in Toledo, they\u2019re going to solely blame it on the victim. If someone dies in the plant, the company is supposed to pay the family triple the benefits. My coworker died here last year. They told us they were working on him. He still had a pulse. He was cold before the ambulance arrived or even knew where he was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t pronounce him dead until he left this property. That\u2019s just plain wicked and disgusting behavior on the part of the company.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a statement posted on his X\/Twitter account, Jerry White, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for US vice president, stated:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore and I express our deepest condolences to the wife and children of Antonio Gaston, who was killed at the Toledo Jeep Complex Wednesday. We demand a full investigation of his death, carried out by a committee of trusted rank-and-file workers themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is no doubt, however, that Antonio is the latest victim of America\u2019s industrial slaughterhouse, which subordinates workers\u2019 lives to capitalist profit. This is the brutal system that Harris and Trump, both corporate controlled parties and the UAW bureaucracy defend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSince the signing of the 2023 UAW labor agreements, hailed by UAW President Shawn Fain and US President Joe Biden, as \u2018historic\u2019 and \u2018life-changing,\u2019 autoworkers have been subjected to a savage attack on their jobs and working conditions. Thousands of part-time and full-time workers have lost their jobs and those remaining face increasingly deadly conditions in the factories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAt Ford, 46-year-old Tywaun Long Jr. died of a heart attack on April 17 because of exhausting hours and speedup. Now, Antonio Gaston\u2019s name has been added to the long list of autoworkers, including Steven Dierkes, Danny Walters, Catherine Pace and Daulton Simmers, who have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. This is not limited to the auto industry. Just a few miles from the Jeep plant, the two young brothers, Ben and Max Morrissey, were killed in an entirely preventable explosion at the nearby BP Husky oil refinery in September 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow, Fain and his PR department think they can fool workers with their phony grievance writing campaign to \u2018enforce the contract\u2019 and force Stellantis to \u2018keep their promise\u2019 to reopen the Belvidere plant. But it was precisely the sellout agreement backed by Fain & Co. that has given the auto corporations the green light to destroy tens of thousands of jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWorkers cannot rely on the UAW bureaucracy, let alone Harris and Trump, to protect them. Instead, workers must expand the network of rank-and-file committees in the factories so they can assert the power of workers on the shop floor over job safety and conditions. In March 2022, workers at Jeep, Warren Truck, Sterling Heights and other Stellantis plants shut down the industry with wildcat strikes because the UAW and management kept production running as Covid was spreading throughout the factories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker who ran as a socialist candidate for UAW president against Fain, said, the right to a safe job, and the right to a secure and good-paying job, can only be won through the collective action of the rank-and-file in opposition to the UAW apparatus. This struggle must be guided by the principle that workers\u2019 social rights take precedence over corporate profit and private capitalist ownership of the giant corporations, which have been built up through labor of generations of workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe SEP calls for the unity of autoworkers around the world in a common fight against job-cutting and deadly conditions, and for Stellantis, Ford, GM, VW and other giant corporations to be transformed into public industries, collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

wsws<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is holding a meeting this Sunday, August 25, at 3:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, \u201cFor global action to defend jobs at Warren Truck and around the world!\u201d A 53-year-old worker at the Toledo Jeep Assembly Complex was crushed to death on the assembly line at the Ohio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":31263,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1152],"tags":[30168,23754,30169,5427],"class_list":["post-31262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanrights","tag-antonio-gaston","tag-stellantis","tag-toledo-jeep","tag-worker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31264,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31262\/revisions\/31264"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}