So, Delphi has done what is has threatened to do: it’s gone to court asking a judge for the right to tear up its labor agreements. This was not a surprise–the threats have been there for some time. It certainly made The New York Times’ list of important events, rating the front-page lead story:

Delphi, the nation’s biggest auto parts maker, on Friday asked a federal judge for permission to throw out some of its labor agreements, a move that could cost 20,000 union workers their jobs and leave thousands of others with less than half their current wages.

Delphi, which is operating in bankruptcy, wants the judge’s permission to impose sharply lower wages and benefits on six unions, setting up a confrontation that its largest union, the United Automobile Workers, said could lead to a lengthy strike.

A strike could also cripple General Motors, which spun off Delphi in 1999 and remains its biggest customer. And any harm to G.M. could eviscerate the U.A.W.’s own influence as one of the nation’s most socially progressive and powerful unions, while accelerating the slide of the American auto industry.

Delphi said it would close or sell all but 8 of its 29 plants in the United States and cut 28,500 positions around the world. Beyond the 20,000 of its 33,100 hourly jobs in the United States that Delphi plans to cut, another 8,500 salaried jobs worldwide are to be eliminated.

We’ve been tracking this development for some time here. This is clearly a challenge to the UAW and a tough one at that. The CEO of Delphi, Steve Miller, has not endeared himself to the workers in the company after he floated a plan, back in November to give executives huge benefits as part of the bankruptcy plan.

I don’t know how the union gets out of this without a real hit to the membership and deep cuts in pay. I don’t know how you strike Delphi without sending General Motors sliding into backruptcy, which means, at the end of the day, thousands more UAW members will lost their jobs. On the other hand, how can one not strike Delphi? Without a strike Delphi, with the help of the judicial system, will trash the union contract–and GM and others corporations will just replicate that model time and again. It’s not an easy choice.

But, it is a deep crisis that requires the focus of the labor movement. As I wrote recently, the kinds of benefits Delphi and GM workers get makes corporations gag–they do not want a world where people can expect to get a decent retirement and health care as part of the job. And they have to love the fact that Delphi and GM are sinking into a financial mess because, if the two either go under or trash the union contract, when the generation that is just being born reaches work age, they will have no idea what it meant to have a decent job because, at this rate, there will be no model to point to.

For that reason–the threat that the Delphi petition to put a stake through the UAW contract poses to every union–it seems to me that this would be a proper place for the two federations, the AFL-CIO and Change To Win, to call a joint strategy meeting to come up with a nationwide response. Everybody has to swallow their pride and turf and see this as one of those moments where if action isn’t taken, we will regret it for some time.

One thing that keeps infuriating me is the way the bankruptcy laws are used to shed pensions and attack workers. I know “Reform the Bankruptcy Laws” is not much of a rallying cry (oopppsss, I forgot, that just happened except that that reform was done on behalf of the credit card industry to screw tens of thousands of average Americans–a reform supported by a whole slew of Democrats), but I do think the question of the lack of fairness just screams out to people.