Has Canadian labour given up the fight?
Financial Post
May 9, 2008
When lawmakers were busy sketching out the details of the North American Free Trade agreement in 1988, Buzz Hargrove, then assistant to Canadian Auto Workers president Bob White, said the union would “fight like hell” against lower U.S. wages and benefits that could creep into Canada.
And when DaimlerChrysler AG cancelled its plans for an Ontario pickup truck plant in Windsor in 2003, Mr. Hargrove again said he would “fight like hell” to make Chrysler live up to its commitments. In fact, “fight like hell” has been such a repeated part of the labour leader’s lexicon over the years that it has become a cliché.
Now, some trade unionists argue, it’s also a downright lie.
The CAW’s newly ratified three-year agreement with Ford Motor Co., which leaves wages and benefits essentially flat, has drawn criticism of Mr. Hargrove from all sides. While investors may think he won too much for Ford workers at a time when the automaker is losing millions of dollars in North America, unionists say the deal and the way it was done was the CAW’s biggest bendover to corporate power in years. It proves Mr. Hargrove is no longer fighting at all, and hasn’t for some time.
And if the head of one of Canada’s largest private sector unions is perceived to have given up on unions’ traditional role as aggressive defenders of the working class, can other labour leaders be far behind?
“The fact is that Canadian unions increasingly seem as disoriented as their American counterparts and Canadian unionism generally seems no less frozen in the headlights,” Sam Gindin, a former CAW economist, concluded this past week in an analysis piece in The Bullet, a collection of opinions published by the Socialist Project group.
“There are of course sporadic and impressive struggles,” wrote Mr. Gindin, now a lecturer in political economics at York University. “But these occasional bursts of militancy do not add up to a reversal of direction.”
With some notable exceptions - the United Auto Workers strike at American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc., now more than two months old, and the year-long lockout at Quebecor Inc.’s Journal de Québec newspaper, embattled with the Canadian Union of Public Employees - major confrontations between management and labour has generally subsided over the years in North America. Quickie strikes, like the ones the UAW took last year against General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, have become the norm rather than the exception.
But Mr. Gindin and others claim Mr. Hargrove, considered by many to be one of the country’s smartest labour leaders, has taken union-weakening to a whole new level. The deal with Ford, Mr. Gindin argued, is the latest and clearest example yet of what he calls Mr. Hargrove’s re-orientation “from taking on power, to accommodating it.”
It started when the CAW leader stood on stage in 2005 with then Prime Minister Paul Martin and declared he was personally backing the reigning Liberals, Mr. Gindin argued. It continued when Mr. Hargrove negotiated a deal with Magna International Inc. that gives up the union’s right to strike, he said. And it came to a crashing climax when Mr. Hargrove announced on April 28 that his bargaining team had struck a deal on a new master contract with Ford - nearly five months before the current contract was set to expire and two months before the union’s collective bargaining conference, where delegates debate the union’s bargaining priorities, including the auto talks.
“Ford ‘bit’ and bargaining was over before anyone, including the Ford workers, had a whiff that anything was going on,” Mr. Gindin wrote. “That many workers may now be relieved - it could have been worse - doesn’t speak to the larger question of how the union got to the point of a leadership with no intent to fight and a membership passively waiting to see how bad things might get.”
On Internet discussion boards and in private, some CAW workers are questioning whether they could have gotten a better deal from Ford, and why Mr. Hargrove settled early without mobilizing union members through widespread meetings as he has done in past campaigns. They argue the union has to take a more aggressive approach precisely to avoid being swept into the financial logic being put forward by companies. “We are too busy playing survivor to get that it is not a game we can win by caving into believing we are the problem,” one worker wrote.
“The problem, it seems, is that once the union accepts the argument that competitiveness is a goal workers must conform to … the union ends up with no agenda independent of the corporations,” Mr. Gindin said. “Mobilizing the workers to fight the corporations is then largely irrelevant.”
Some critics argue that unions’ unwillingness to engage in the major confrontations of years past is further evidence they are becoming an extension of corporations’ human resource departments. And they wonder why anyone would pay union dues for that. Workers at two big manufacturers, ArcelorMittal Dofasco Inc. and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc., rejected union drives this spring. In Toyota’s case, management argued the union would no better protect its interests than the company would.
Alan Levy, a labour relations specialist at the University of Regina’s faculty of business administration, sees in Mr. Hargrove’s actions not a sign of the impending implosion of organized labour, but rather a very calculated approach by a leader working within the geographical confines of an ailing manufacturing economy in central Canada.
“The crucial element here is would the results have been any different” if Mr. Hargrove had pressed harder, Mr. Levy said. “I would surmise that Mr. Hargrove and his executive are once again trying to make the best of a very bad situation.”
The CAW president himself certainly sees it that way. “Snooze and you lose,” Mr. Hargrove said in an interview this week, arguing the union risked losing more at Ford if it waited longer and industry conditions worsened. “Every elected [auto] leader supported trying to do something early here. That’s over 500 elected people at the three companies. I could be wrong. All those folks can’t be wrong.”
But Mr. Hargrove was wrong in one crucial way in his handling of the Ford deal, said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He didn’t create enough appearance of conflict, which modern day labour relations requires. In that sense, he got the deal but didn’t do enough to sell it to the membership. Overall support for the contact was 67%, an all-time low in the 23-year history of the union.
“Usually, there’s a little theatre involved,” which can include short strikes by workers who are made to feel they’re fighting for something, or grandstanding by labour leaders, Mr. Chaison said. “He didn’t go into theatrics. And as a result, he had difficulty making a case that the ultimate pressure was brought to bear on the company.”
All is not settled, of course. The CAW leader, who represents about 33,000 workers in total at three Detroit-based automakers, still has to reach deals with Chrysler and GM. Mr. Chaison said it will only get more difficult for Mr. Hargrove in the weeks ahead. “It’s going to heat up.”
These are Mr. Hargrove’s last negotiations with the Detroit-based automakers before he retires next year. We may see a fight, or an approximation of one, yet.