CANADA-LABOUR: Auto Workers Take on General Motors and Win

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Oct 25 1996 (IPS) - Unwilling to accept the prospect of permanent job insecurity, Canadian auto workers stood up to global giant General Motors and won.

In their three-week strike against General Motors Canada, which ended this week, about 26,000 Canadian Auto Workers members took a stand against “the economic elites in Canada and the United States” that preach to workers that they have no alternative but to accept insecurity, according to CAW president Buzz Hargrove.

“This strike was about working people asserting, by their words and actions, that things can change and that fighting back matters,” Hargrove told his members in a union bulletin.

On Thursday, nearly 90 percent of CAW members voted in favour of a contract with GM Canada — which prior to the strike announced records profits of 1.04 billion dollars — that restricts out- sourcing, hikes wages by 10 percent, including cost of living allowances, and bans mandatory overtime.

The CAW represents workers at various GM facilities in southwestern Ontario, as well an additional plant in neighbouring Quebec.

GM’s demand for greater flexibility to use out-sourcing — the use of non-union supplier — was the key issue in the labour dispute, which crippled GM assembly lines and parts plants throughout North America.

Business commentators had lectured the CAW on the inevitability of out-sourcing in an age of global competition. But GM eventually backed down and agreed that every job lost to out-sourcing out must be replaced by another job to maintain existing employment levels at GM Canada during the course of the three-year agreement.

The union, in turn, agreed not to oppose the sale of two Ontario parts plants. But the GM will provide certain protections for the 3,500 affected workers, including guarantees that workers will receive the same level of wages and benefits from the new owners for at least three years.

Out-sourcing tends to be more of an issue in North America, where there is a 10-dollar-an-hour average wage difference between union and non-union workers, explained Pradeep Kumar, a professor of industrial relations at Queens University in Ontario. In Western Europe, such discrepancies don’t exist because industry-wide bargaining is the norm.

GM’s willingness to drop its insistence on mandatory overtime was also “very significant,” according to Charlotte Yates, a labor studies professor at McMaster University in Ontario.

The corporation had always been adamant about having some flexibility in this area, and it was lobbying the Ontario government to raise the current legal limits on allowable mandatory overtime by eight hours.

But the CAW was firm on the overtime issue, as its members complained of the havoc it was playing on their lives and the impact it had on their families.

The GM Canada settlement is the second agreement with an automobile manufacturer where the CAW has managed to negotiate strong employment standards provisions. And it comes at a time when the provincial government is contemplating weakening legal protection for workers.

In contrast, U.S. workers cannot refuse employer demands to work overtime.

The gains that the militant Canadian union achieved in its settlement should bolster labour negotiators in the United States and Australia, where union members face similar demands from GM, Yates said.

Yates, author of ‘From Plant to Politics: the Autoworkers Union in Postwar Canada’, noted that the United Auto Workers union was fully supportive of its Canadian counterpart, with UAW members joining a CAW picket line in the city of Windsor, Ontario, just across the border from Detroit.

This development, she said, marks as an improvement in relations between the two unions, which been merged as a single North American organisation until a split about 10 years ago.

Parts shortages caused by the CAW strike led to the temporary layoff of another 20,000 GM workers in the United States and Mexico.

Vertically integrated manufacturers, such as GM are vulnerable to strikes, Kumar argued. And, he said, it is one of the reasons the company agreed to settle the strike.

At the beginning of the strike, it appeared that the CAW was in a no-win situation, according to most observers. And GM’s stock price on Wall Street shot up as the company made it clear that it was intent on teaching the Canadian union a lesson.

Jack Smith, chief executive officer Detroit-based multinational corporation, openly declared that his company had