Inside the CAW jacket
Perhaps no other event in the history of the Canadian Auto-workers (CAW) has evoked more of a reaction than the spectacle in December 2005 of CAW National President Buzz Hargrove gleefully giving then Prime Minister Paul Martin a CAW jacket to wear while Martin was campaigning for re-election. New Democratic Party (NDP) members and supporters were infuriated. The Liberals were ecstatic. The Left outside of the NDP cringed.
But “Jacketgate” is really misunderstood. It is misunderstood because it did not actually mark a sudden or dramatic shift in the political or class orientation of the CAW. The CAW’s right turn has actually been taking shape since shortly after the Ontario Days of Action (the series of mass protests from 1995 to 1999 against the Mike Harris Tory government, some of which included political strike action) were deliberately wound down after the leaders of the right-wing “pink paper” group of mostly private sector unions achieved supremacy in the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL).
ONTARIO 1999
The demise of the extra-parliamentary social movement that was mobilized during the Ontario Days of Action went hand in hand with a deliberate and general retreat by organized labour in Ontario, where the CAW’s membership is concentrated, into electoral politics. Defeating the province’s Tory government at the polls in 1999 became the sole objective of Ontario labour.
While there was unity with regard to the objective, there was disagreement over the electoral tactic for achieving it. Essentially two distinct tactics were pursued. One focused on exclusively supporting the NDP. The other focused on voting for those candidates most likely to defeat a Tory, meaning, in most cases, a Liberal (“strategic voting”). The CAW made a decisive political turn to the right by embracing the latter tactic. This marked a sea change for the CAW, which had been a bulwark of support for the NDP since the party’s formation in 1961.
In 1995, the CAW leadership had punished the Ontario NDP for its antiworker Social Contract legislation while continuing to support the NDP in the rest of English Canada. The CAW did this by adopting a policy in the 1995 Ontario provincial election of only supporting NDP candidates who defied the NDP government of Premier Bob Rae by openly opposing the Social Contract. This meant the CAW adopted a political position decisively to the left of both the NDP and every other predominantly private sector union. This political orientation to the left of the NDP remained clearly in force for the next couple of years while the Days of Action were taking place.
Nonetheless, the planned demise of the Days of Action and the collapse of the movement associated with them facilitated the CAW’s subsequent right turn. It set the stage for the abandonment by the CAW of its tradition of unwavering support for the NDP in favour of “strategic voting.” Many CAW activists and local leaders opposed this right turn, wanting to remain loyal to the NDP. Others on the far left opposed it, seeing it as a clear opening to the Liberals and an abandonment of working-class politics.
These developments went hand in hand with an extensive survey of the CAW rank and file about the union’s involvement in politics. The leadership analyzed the results and concluded the CAW would be more politically effective if it focused its political work on key issues, rather than just on building support for the NDP. A new “non-partisan” political course could now be justified. This new course proved to be conducive to strategic voting becoming an entrenched CAW policy.
Beyond this, the collapse of the social movement, embodied in the Ontario Days of Action, set the stage for much more than just a measured degree of electoral support for the Liberals. It simultaneously led to a significant change in the way the CAW addressed issues that went along with strategic voting, and had similar political effects. Specifically, extra-parliamentary political action ceased to be a central feature of the CAW’s mobilization around political issues. With this the CAW’s advocacy of what it claims is “social movement unionism” started to ring increasingly hollow. More and more effort was channeled into lobbying politicians and timid postcard and letter writing campaigns. It was as if the CAW had disavowed militant mass protest and the politics of the street.
QUEBEC CITY 2001
Indeed, the final gasp of the CAW’s commitment to the latter was vividly on display in Quebec City in April 2001 during the mass protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. That was when most of organized labour turned its back on the youth who constituted the vanguard of the then thriving movement against capitalist globalization and who personify the future of the Left. During the two days of mass confrontation in Quebec City between riot police and these inspiring youth and their genuine allies, including some CAW activists and local leaders, the few prominent CAW members present largely stayed clear of the main events. They took part in the organized labour’s hapless march to an empty parking lot on the outskirts of Quebec City instead.
On the same weekend, the large majority of the CAW leadership met at CAW Council far away in Port Elgin, Ontario (top CAW leaders had refused to move the meeting to Montreal in order to facilitate maximum participation in the mobilizations in Quebec City). In retrospect, what happened that weekend in April 2001 was a telling indication of how much things had changed in the CAW after the demise of the Ontario Days of Action, and how much they stood in contrast to electrifying events like the occupation of the Oshawa Fabrication Plant during the 1996 CAW strike against GM, as well as the one day mass strike in Toronto as part of the Days of Action.
April 2001 revealed how much of a gap there now was between the CAW’s occasionally militant rhetoric and practical reality. The chilling political fallout from 9/11 subsequently accentuated this marked shift away from militancy.
The new emphasis on political tactics like lobbying coupled with the embrace of strategic voting combined to give additional momentum to building a closer relationship with the Liberals. Lines of communication with the Liberals grew stronger. Bridges were being built between the CAW and the Liberals, especially under Paul Martin’s federal government and Ontario’s Liberal government, to the obvious pleasure of the Liberals, who are ever-eager to undercut labour support for the NDP. This, in large measure, set the stage for “Jacketgate.”
But another critically important dynamic was at work with a very similar trajectory. The development of the auto and auto parts industry in Ontario within the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement and capitalist globalization prompted a significant shift in the relationship between the CAW and the auto corporations it collectively bargains with. Developments over the past decade and a half within this industry have led to a continuous downsizing of the workforce, especially at the “Big 3” auto company operations in Canada. Worse still, this downsizing of the CAW’s auto and auto parts workforce has occurred at the same time as non-union auto manufacturing operations at Toyota and Honda have expanded. This expansion has been prompted mainly by increased sales by these corporations and growing market share. This is resulting in the very ominous growth of a non-union workforce in the Canadian auto industry that directly threatens the future of pattern or industry-wide CAW collective agreements.
OSHAWA 2006
These developments have resulted in fierce competition for a diminishing number of jobs at GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler, prompting those corporations to step up their pressure for both contract concessions by the CAW and massive government subsidies with the blessing of a CAW desperate to stop the relentless job losses. Confronted with this increasingly dire situation the CAW has become less and less adversarial in its relationship to these employers and more and more willing to accommodate their demands for more “flexible” collective agreements. Top CAW leaders are seemingly oblivious to the harsh impact of this on rank and file CAW members, the people who have to work under these flexible agreements and who experience daily the effects of the relentless restructuring of operations and the speed-up that flexible agreements (like the recently negotiated GM Oshawa “shelf agreement”) are designed to facilitate.
The end result is yet another development that goes hand in hand with developing a closer relationship to the Liberals who are usually best positioned to deliver the government subsidies to these corporations in exchange for new investments. Such investments are also tied to the acceptance of local contract concessions that give the corporations more flexibility in managing their workplaces and facilitating corresponding reductions in production costs at our members’ expense. In effect, consent to a reorganization of the work process on the shop floor has coincided with a realignment of the CAW’s political orientation, making for a broad realignment of the union’s class orientation inside and outside the workplace.
In contrast to the Liberals, the NDP is largely left out in the cold. Being out of power, the NDP cannot deliver government subsidies, and can only be very useful to the CAW in the auto and auto parts industries if and when it holds the balance of power while a minority Liberal government is in office.
The CAW’s subsequent break from the NDP cannot be fully understood without grasping these things. Indeed, the context they define also goes a long way towards explaining the CAW leadership’s recent fury at the NDP over the federal party’s decision late last year to not continue to prop up Paul Martin’s federal Liberal government in order to extract legislation the CAW desired. This context also largely explains the depth of their current, deepened disillusionment with the NDP. This begs the question of what can be done in the wake of the CAW’s pre-determined decision, at a CAW Council meeting in April, to terminate its relationship to the NDP and opt for a redoubling of its less-than-consistent support for its social movement partners as an ostensibly viable political alternative.
It is a political dead end to demand an unlikely, but not inconceivable, restoration of the CAW’s relationship with the NDP. There is no reason at all to believe a restored relationship would be followed by a determined CAW effort to challenge both the NDP leadership and the increasingly right-wing drift of the NDP. The effective absence of any such effort throughout all the years the CAW was in the NDP precludes any credible hope that this would be attempted. Even if the current top leadership of the CAW was swept from power and its army of full time officers suddenly embraced anticapitalist politics in a truly meaningful (as opposed to a rhetorical and momentary) way, the rightward drift of social democratic parties globally in the context of 21st century capitalism would doom an attempt to turn the NDP decisively to the left to failure.
POLITICAL ALTERNATIVE
Working towards the formation of a political alternative decisively to the left of the NDP is a more plausible option. But it has little support currently within the CAW. In the absence of more support this must be considered a distant goal. Nonetheless, ongoing advocacy of a political alternative to the left of the NDP is still critically necessary in order to methodically build support for its eventual formation.
In the meantime, there is a compelling need for an immediate political strategy which combines sustained attacks on continued CAW electoral support for the Liberals, and strategic voting with relentless demands that the CAW leadership return to an adversarial and meaningful anti-concessions stance towards employers, fully cognizant of how succumbing to corporate demands for flexibility is ultimately suicidal for a workers’ organization. Finally, the CAW leadership must also be relentlessly pressed to effectively practice what they are now preaching in relation to our social partners. They must be compelled to forge a renewed, sustained and consistent commitment to militant, Willie Lambert is challenging Buzz Hargrove for CAW President (www.willielambert.org) extra-parliamentary political action of the kind we saw during the Ontario Days of Action whose demise largely set the stage for the current, muddled political mess highlighted in December by “Jacketgate.”
For the first time in the history of the CAW there will be a contested election for CAW National President. Willie Lambert is running against Buzz Hargrove. Willie is a bus driver and CAW local leader in Oakville, Ontario, and the President of the Oakville & District Labour Council. He previously ran twice against Wayne Samuelson for President of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL). Willie has been an outspoken critic of many of Hargrove’s policies and vigorously opposed the CAW’s recent decision to withdraw all support for the NDP. He wants to see the CAW restore its relationship to both the NDP and the OFL and help to move both organizations to the left with a workers’ agenda. Willie is a member of the revived CAW Left Caucus. His campaign has attracted a considerable amount of publicity and a growing degree of interest. The CAW hierarchy is not taking his candidacy lightly. Already votes have been engineered at meetings of many bodies within the CAW to endorse the re-election of Hargrove and other current top CAW officers. Clearly the CAW bureaucracy wants to rig the outcome before the votes for CAW National President are cast at the CAW Constitutional Convention scheduled for the week of August 14 in Vancouver. It knows there is considerable discontent with Hargrove at the base of the CAW that could surface in the secret ballot vote. The CAW bureaucracy no doubt remembers upstart Carol Wall’s stunning result when she drew 37% of the delegate vote in the election for Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) President last June in Montreal and put the future of Ken Georgetti as CLC President on thin ice.
Bruce Allen is the Vice-President of CAW Local 199 in St. Catharines, Ontario. He founded the CAW Left Caucus.
