Case New Holland Industrial (CNHi), which produces agricultural and construction equipment in 18 factories in the United States, is an Italian-U.S. multinational whose major owner is a financial fund created in 2012 by the merger of U.S. CNH with FIAT. The bosses are Italian but the headquarters are in the Netherlands, confirming how capital is an international class relationship and nationalism an ideological tool against the proletariat to keep it divided and make it slog along.

At two plants in the Midwest, in Racine, Wisconsin, on Great Lake Michigan, and Burlington, Iowa, 450 kilometers apart, collective bargaining agreements expired on April 30. The two local branches of the United Auto Workers -- the regimented union in the auto industry affiliated with the AFL-CIO confederation -- the "UAW Local 180" in Racine and the "UAW Local 807" in Burlington, finding the employers’ proposals for renewal unsatisfactory, called the 1,000 workers in the two factories to strike from May 2.

The strike lasted a full eight months. The UAW, which has a strike fund of about $185 million (the subject of a recent embezzlement scandal), paid the strikers a check for $400 a week.

With such a large fund, it could have supported a long-term strike at all CNHi factories across the country. Instead, the union leadership confined the dispute to the two factories, without trying to open a broader and stronger front of struggle by mobilizing all CNHi factories. It appears from this that the local union sections in Racine and Burlington pressured the UAW leadership to expand the struggle, taking it beyond the confines of the two factories.

In Racine, on December 17, a demonstration was organized in support of the strike by the UAW and a diverse set of other organizations, whose broad spectrum ranged from workers’ organizations to those of the liberal bourgeois left.

The initiative of the rally of support is certainly useful, all the more so in the United States, where it is still extremely rare. But such an action should have been aimed at growing workers’ unity, extending the struggle to other factories in the group, to other companies in the territory, to other categories. It should have had a class rather than a popular character, which it had, consonant the latter with the scrambling of the electoral politics of the bourgeois and opportunist workers’ parties.

The demonstration did, however, have the good result of raising funds for the local union branch, thus facilitating the possibility of continuing the strike.

CNHi responded by presenting a new offer, which the UAW union sections again rejected by organizing a vote, by secret ballot, in which they instructed the workers to vote against it. On Saturday, January 7, the contract was rejected.

But the details of the negotiations are the sole preserve of union leaders. In eight months no assemblies were ever called to inform the workers and involve them in organizing the struggle, thus imposing a relationship between the mass of workers and the union that resembles that between customers and a service-providing agency, in which all those intermediate actions, such as assemblies, meetings, picket lines and propaganda, that make the union alive thanks to the voluntary efforts of the most combative workers, disappear.

After the vote, the Minister of Labor intervened to mediate in the negotiations and a second contract was proposed, ominously presented as "final". In the meantime, the company had taken care to inform the workers, through voicemails and text messages, that they would be replaced with other permanent workers if they did not accept the proposal.

On Jan. 23, a second vote approved the employer proposal with 70 percent in favor, despite indications from sections of the union that they would vote against it.

Local UAW leaders during the eight months of struggle stressed the positive value of unity in action among workers at the two plants and also denounced the factory-divided collective agreements applied by CNHi. But they never confronted the union leadership so that it would develop general action to combat this obvious employers’ practice.

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