On and After the Magna Vote

By,Bruce Allen is the Vice-President of CAW Local 199 ,
St. Catharines, Ontario.

The decline in overall union density, particularly in the private sector, has been a defining characteristic of the crisis of organized labour in this country for many years along with the debilitating effects of contract concessions. The union bureaucracy's predominant response has been to barely acknowledge there was a problem never mind seriously attempt to address it. That is until now.

Whatever one thinks of the CAW's "innovative" voluntary recognition agreement with Magna International credit must be given where credit is due. On December 7, when the CAW bureaucracy made its case to the CAW Council for its agreement with Magna, it directly addressed this crisis of declining union density confronting organized labour. It even explicitly noted that this crisis raised the specter of a decline in union density like the one which has been experienced by organized labour in the U.S. Accordingly, in selling the Magna agreement to the CAW Council delegates, the union's economist Jim Stanford declared that the CAW was in a "fight for survival" and a "fight for power". He went on to proclaim that this agreement with Magna will "dramatically reinforce our critical mass in the whole (auto and auto parts) industry."

Indeed the Magna Agreement may ultimately do far more than that. If the CAW National President Buzz Hargrove's offer to extend similar agreements to Toyota, Honda, Dofasco and even to General Motors, if it builds new facilities in Canada, is accepted this would do two things. It would both dramatically reverse the decline in private sector union density and make the CAW the dominant private sector union in Canada. The other private sector unions would be effectively marginalized.

This poses two obvious questions. At what price will this be achieved and with what consequences? One must also ask what kind of a labour movement would result?
One thing is painfully obvious. The CAW's agreement with Magna is a product of the increasing weakness and failures of the leadership of organized labour in Canada. This is particularly so in Ontario where the manufacturing sector and Magna's operations are concentrated.
Weakness
Three things highlight this weakness and these failures in Ontario. One is the absence of card check union certification for all but construction workers. Another is the absence of anti-scab legislation. Yet another is the horrific absence of strong plant closure legislation really protecting workers and their communities and limiting capital mobility. Such types of legislation would make it far easier to organize workplaces, win first contract strikes and curtail employers' ability to threaten workers with plant closures. In other words, all three would mutually reinforce and enhance each other.

If workers had had the benefit of all three things the ongoing decline in union density would never have developed. Union power would be as formidable as it ever was. It logically follows that winning all three of these things would facilitate a resurgence of union density and union power by facilitating successful organizing drives at places like Magna. This would also be true in non-unionized service sector workplaces..

Furthermore, it is very telling that there are currently no serious, ongoing efforts to achieve any of these three badly needed labour law changes favouring workers. This exemplifies how the union bureaucracy rarely even attempts to mobilize workers to wage political fights for specific legislative changes very clearly in workers' interests and rarely attempt anything more than timid lobbying efforts.

In the case of the CAW matters are even worse. We have seen the shameless embrace of leading Liberal politicians like Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, then Prime Minister Paul Martin and even of the Tory premier of Newfoundland as a way to secure political influence. The union's alienation from the rest of organized labour has become more pronounced as a result and the CAW leadership acts like it could not care less.

So what then is the price of the agreement with Magna? The immediate price consists of an open ended abandonment of the right to strike at the largest auto parts maker in Canada and an agreement to a structure of representation denying workers the right to directly elect whoever they want to represent them based on an agenda they freely define. In practical terms this means the CAW is willingly sinking even deeper into the quicksand of embracing labour - management cooperation policies and further abandoning an adversarial relationship towards relationship toward Capital. This will just encourage more of the same from an increasingly passive, fractured Canadian labour movement already mired in such muck.
Illusory
The CAW bureaucracy and its ambitious apologists counter that the Magna agreement is a "foot in the door" which will allow the union to be successfully built within the framework of the new agreement. The naivety of this claim is incredulous. It perpetuates an illusory belief, long evident in the CAW, that no matter how much or what you concede to the bosses it's possible to build the power of the union on the shop floor without directly violating what you have just agreed to.

This is especially true with respect to Magna. Over the past 50 years Magna management have crafted an ingenious, thoroughly comprehensive system of operations designed to keep unions out until now. This system remains clearly designed to eliminate union consciousness, never mind class consciousness, before it develops within its workforce.
The process for selecting "Employee Advocates" at Magna is a case in point. That process will systematically obstruct the emergence of local union leadership with any inclination to challenge the power of the boss or the corporation's agenda. Indeed, the negotiated Framework for Fairness precludes these things by stipulating that there will be "a mutually agreed upon checklist" for determining who can be a candidate for Employee Advocate and it goes on to state that "once an Employee Advocate is appointed, training shall be provided by Magna and the CAW." Allowing Magna to train CAW representatives of the workers certainly is innovative. Furthermore, the process for selecting Employee Advocates can only be changed if Magna management agrees. Whatever happened to workers truly controlling their own organizations?

As if that is not enough the CAW explicitly agreed to forbid the politicization of the work environment. The CAW committed itself to oppose "activities in a division that politicize or polarize the workplace" because they "have the potential to disrupt operations and create a negative work environment." In view of this it is extremely difficult to imagine how anything resembling a real union can be built at Magna unless the workers are prepared to rebel against BOTH the CAW leadership and Magna. More generally, if the CAW succeeds in getting Magna type agreements at Toyota, Honda, Dofasco and elsewhere, this could easily cause a major entry into the CAW of "union leadership" who embrace the ideology of the corporations they work for and spread such corporate ideology throughout the culture of the CAW.
Endorsement?
Despite all of this the adoption by some 90% of the delegates to the CAW Council of a recommendation from CAW National President Buzz Hargrove supporting the Magna agreement could still be seen as a powerful endorsement of this ostensibly innovative agreement that continues trends evident in the CAW over the past decade. (See Inside the CAW Jacket circa 2006). Not quite.

First of all the national leadership began to implement the Magna agreement before the CAW Council had a chance to vote on it. So on December 7 the delegates were being presented with what amounted to a fait accompli. Second of all, one must also question how meaningful a vote is from a council that hasn't voted down a single recommendation from the CAW National President over the past 15 years.

Then there are the matters of how the debate was run and the way the vote was cast. Many of those who spoke at the microphones in support of the Magna Agreement were appointed members of CAW staff. They were carrying out their marching orders with no regard for the fact that their role should be limited to implementing CAW policy rather than playing a direct role in determining what it will be. Delegates to the council were elected by the CAW membership to do the latter not them.

Then when the debate concluded the person chairing the meeting and overseeing the debate threw impartiality to the wind by making a long winded intervention in support of the National President's recommendation. This was clearly done to decisively sway the outcome of the vote.
Intimidation
The icing on the cake came when he abruptly declared that the vote would be held by having the delegates cast their votes by standing up to show how they were voting. This meant that those who were opposed to the recommendation had to do so under the watchful eyes of all of the delegates along with the top CAW leadership and their small army of staff representatives who service the delegates' local unions. Given this it is more than reasonable to suggest that the pressure put on the delegates to vote for the recommendation was considerable. Indeed, it amounted to naked intimidation.

Furthermore, the use of intimidation was not limited to the CAW Council meeting. Just prior to the meeting the President of one large CAW local threatened delegates from his local who he expected to go to the microphones to speak against the Magna agreement.

In effect, this sordid episode not only reinforced the CAW's increasing support of labour - management cooperation policies. It also reinforced the leadership's willingness to resort to intimidation at the expense of the severely limited degree of internal democracy there is in the CAW at the national level. This was another immediate and notable consequence of the Magna agreement.

Volumes could be written concerning what these things mean in terms of the kind of labour movement we will have in Canada in the wake of the Magna agreement and the CAW Council vote sanctioning it. A lot will depend upon whether the notoriously non-unionized corporations Buzz Hargrove has offered a Magna type agreement to will accept the offer. If they accept it the Canadian labour movement will both get bigger and be even more closely wedded to Capital than it already is. Unions will further resemble service organizations.

The timid façade of a labour movement we presently have will look radical by comparison. This is largely because traditional collective agreements still afford workers an opportunity to organize collectively and to exercise their collective power as workers.
However if these corporations reject the offer we cannot just expect more of the same as we have seen recently. We will almost certainly see generally weaker union contracts negatively affected by the willingness of the Canada's largest private sector union to indefinitely give up the right to strike in exchange for voluntary recognition agreements.

Nonetheless, both of these outcomes can be avoided if we work for the emergence of a new left within the pan-Canadian labour movement. This left would not expect to transform the existing structures and would necessarily embody solidarity unionism rooted at the labour movement's base. It would have the task of forging a revived labour movement from the bottom up. This left would be determined to truly fight for changes vital to both rebuilding union power anew and to confronting Capital and its agenda.