The Test Is Coming

Jim Stanford offers, as expected, a spirited defense of the CAW agreement. But he doesn’t really get to the points I raised. Since our disagreement is not over the economic package and since it is not really the details of the agreement that are at issue, let me concentrate on just a few key points.

Stanford raises the issue of strategy and points out that this bargaining round was centered on GM’s determination to break pattern. Because GM did accept the pattern, he asserts this was a ‘historic victory’ and chastises me because I didn’t ‘even mention it’.

In fact, however, matching pattern is hardly ‘historic’; companies have threatened to break pattern before and have, for half a century now, generally accepted pattern. GM did refuse to accept pattern in 1996 when it was serious enough to force the CAW out on strike – but it lost and then too accepted pattern.

The notion that GM might seriously have challenged pattern in 2005 is simply unconvincing. In 1996, the issue was pretty fundamental: union limits on outsourcing. What might the issue have been this year? Not pensions – that isn’t even yet an issue in the United States. Not health care given that GM dreams of having Canadian health care costs in the United States.

And not wages, since trying to cut wages was never seriously on the radar screen; amongst other things, it would carry no credibility given the Canadian cost advantage (GM saves $10/hr on Canadian wages). Forcing the union out on strike in these circumstances would have meant a costly defeat for GM – all the more so for the dangerous example it might have set as GM moved on to challenge the UAW. It’s hard, all the more so after the lessons GM learned in 1996, to imagine GM taking such a risk.

Stanford points to the union ‘success’ in getting the government to provide the corporations with large subsidies. What he doesn’t discuss is the fact that after getting $450 million from Canadian taxpayers, GM came out of bargaining with an announcement of 1700 jobs being cut – and there was no protest from the union.

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At issue is not only the question of giving money to GM when GM has itself acknowledged the profitability of its Canadian operations (it only asked for the money because it would have been stupid not to do so after Ford was given a subsidy). At issue is also the question of how this impacts on potential allies (Why is GM getting money that could be going into health care?).

And above all, the question of how this impacts the expectations and consciousness of the CAW’s own members (Member: ‘Why are we supporting these grants to GM’? Union: ‘Because we have no choice in spite of out cost advantage and proven productivity and quality’ Member: ‘So we can’t really fight GM on working conditions or in bargaining?’ Union: ‘Well…’).

This gets to the issue that was of most concern in my criticism. The union clearly had the support of its members, but where was it taking them? What was being learned by workers through the union’s implicit message and actual practice? Letters on health care can play a role, but how much mobilization on health care was/is actually occurring against governments that were being asked for subsidies?

It is one thing to attack Japanese imports (and even here calling for them to open up their markets only legitimates free trade – as if such an opening would not be met via direct investment there or exports from other parts of Asia). But globalization can’t be blamed for everything. After all, the greatest threats from Toyota and Honda are their plants here (overall, auto companies are coming to North America, not leaving it) and while the level of unionization in the Canadian parts industry is double the US, at 40-45 percent, the very same danger signals that came to a head at Delphi are emerging in Canada.

The CAW has an impressive tradition of struggle. As I write this on November 10, the union is meeting in London, Ontario to discuss how it will respond to the threatening gale of concession bargaining. The union will no doubt take a strong position, but the question is whether it will be followed up by the massive grassroots education which real resistance this will require, whether it links this fight to other community struggles, and whether it develops a larger political agenda that holds out the only hope of longer-term success.

The CAW was born out of resisting the spread of concessions from the US a generation ago and at the time its commitment took it to form a new union. So once again the union faces an historic test. I sincerely hope that the union will come through and that Stanford can write an ‘I-told-you-so!” in future editions of Labor Notes. But declaring a fight and carrying one out are not the same thing.