Big Three Bargaining: Different Ways of Making History
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- Published on Monday, 17 October 2016 11:45
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1316 .... October 17, 2016
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Big Three Bargaining: Different Ways of Making History
Sam Gindin
Canadian autoworkers have long been pace setters in the Canadian labour movement and as soon as its most recent agreement with General Motors was ratified, Unifor (the successor in 2013 after the merger of CAW and CEP) laid claim to that agreement's ‘historic’ status. It has now also been ratified by the Chrysler workers, but at the Ford assembly plant in Oakville -- now the largest auto facility in the country -- it's pretty hard to find any enthusiasm for the outcome of this latest bargaining round. If this agreement is indeed historic, it may be so in a sense quite different than the leadership's bravado declaration intended.
Background: The Cancer of Two-Tier Wages
When... the financial crisis of 2007-9 brought GM and Chrysler to their knees, it was hardly surprising that the pressure would intensify on workers. This came not only from the economics of the crisis and threats from the companies, but also from the U.S. and Canadian governments. As they intervened to save the companies with public monies, they notably added further pressures on the union and its members by explicitly demanding autoworkers ‘do their share’ to lower corporate costs. (Ford, the third of the auto triumvirate, had enough of a cash hoard to avoid seeking state help, but was no less anxious to exploit the crisis in bargaining with its unions).
Such working class concessions did not of course start with this latest crisis. In the auto sector, the American union (United Automobile Workers - UAW) had, since the end of the 1970s, repeatedly rationalized wage restraint or concessions as ‘trade-offs’ for jobs. That the job security never really materialized rarely led to that logic being challenged; rather, it only resulted in hunkering down to ever more desperate cycles of concessions to save the remaining jobs which, by virtue of decent-paying jobs disappearing throughout the economy, now seemed even more valuable. In contrast, the Canadian section of the union had over most of that same period strongly opposed that illusory trade off -- to the point of breaking their institutional links with its American parent in the mid-80s to establish the CAW.