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Abstract
This paper examines the evolution of three key institutional systems—CAW/UNIFOR unions, General Motors Canada, and the Canadian federal State—and their impact on workplace relations in Oshawa over a 25-year period. It places particular focus on union policies and shows that important opportunities for workplace transition were lost as local and national leaders avoided critical economic issues and failed to seriously contend with changing objective conditions.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch for their guidance as we developed the argument. We would also like to thank the reviewers and Greg Albo for their helpful comments and feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers; MacDowell, “After the Strike. Labour Relations in Oshawa, 1937–1939.”
2 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers; Yates, From Plant to Politics. The collapse of the Left inside the UAW was especially pronounced after Walter Reuther took control and consolidated his leadership in 1947. By 1948, Reuther had largely succeeded in destroying “left-wing opposition to his leadership” in the United States. Although the Canadian Left caucus gradually “lost much of its control over the union apparatus” following Reuther’s election, it maintained important sources of influence within the Canadian Council until at least the 1960s. See Yates, From Plant to Politics, 185–86.
3 Yates, From Plant to Politics, 185.
4 CAW/UNIFOR has never formally aligned with the Liberal Party of Canada, but has rather adopted a strategy of strategic voting that, for all intents and purposes, produces this outcome. The union’s goal has been to mobilize its membership against the Conservative Party by supporting the most viable Left or centre party. While this has meant supporting NDP candidates in ridings where they are competitive, it has often produced a “vote liberal strategy.” See Savage, “Organized Labour and the Politics of Strategic Voting,” 76. The CAW first adopted this strategy at the federal level in 2006 when it “voted to sever its longstanding relationship with the New Democratic Party” and “endorse Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin.” See Savage, “Organized Labour and the Politics of Strategic Voting,” 75. Local 222 first broke with the NDP in 1993 when members voted to halt funding due to its progressive politics. This reflected deep divisions within the Local and frustration with local working conditions and both the NDP and CAW leadership. See Casey, “Why CAW Local 222 dumped the NDP,” 11.
5 See, for example, Glasbeek, “Oshawa and Postal Workers: Big and Small Lies We Accept”; Johal, “GM’s Closing is a Warning Shot”; Stanford, as quoted in: Rubin, “Jim Stanford on Uber and the Future of Precarious Work.”
6 See Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers; Yates, From Plant to Politics.
7 For example, such tendencies appear in Collins and Rothe, The Violence of Neoliberalism. They also appear, to varying degrees, in Carroll and Sapinski, Organizing the 1%. However, the latter identifies key shifts in corporate organization. Older examples include Grinspun and Kreklewich, “Consolidating Neoliberal Reforms.”
8 The analysis draws partly on archival sources, including evidence obtained from the local union’s monthly newsletter, and four years of interview research with rank-and-file GM workers and members of the local and national union. Interview research consisted of semistructured interviews with local and national union leaders, and current and former GM workers employed between the 1970s and the closure of the plant in 2019. One priority of this research was to hear from workers in Oshawa and try to understand their location in a wider system of institutional and structural power.
9 While both Yates and Gindin focus on the CAW, this paper has a narrower focus because it emphasizes shifts in GM’s Oshawa assembly plant. Though more focused on the competitive constraints impacting the UAW and the opportunities that the “dependent nature of the Canadian industry” provided, Chris Roberts’ work on the Canadian auto industry also helps guide the analysis. See Roberts, Harnessing Competition, 12.
10 This analytic lens broadly follows the work of Yates and Gindin.
11 Maher and Aquanno, “Conceptualizing Neoliberalism,” 36.
12 Workers were represented by the CAW/UNIFOR. The CAW broke from the UAW in 1985. Unifor emerged out of the CAW after it merged with the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union of Canada in 2013. Like the UAW, the CAW/Unifor operates as a federation of local unions linked to a strong national office. Local 222 represented workers at GM’s Oshawa assembly complex.
13 Yates, From Plant to Politics, 261.
14 Fuss and Waverman, “The Canada-U.S. Auto Pact of 1965.”
15 Yates, From Plant to Politics, 281. On the “revolution” created by the Auto Pact, see Anastakis, Autonomous State.
16 Yates, From Plant to Politics, 12–13.
17 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers. Yet by the mid-1970, Canadian policymakers increasingly feared the Auto Pact was not enough to guarantee “fairness in investment.” As a result, federal and provincial governments turned to a strategy of offering incentives to induce automotive investment. See Anastakis, Autonomous State, 252, 268. Reflecting its approach to competitiveness, the UAW in Canada rejected this approach, saying that incentives were a “failure of government to fight for what is Canada’s by right.” See White, “Ford Has a Better Idea, 2”; Anastakis, Autonomous State, 286.
18 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers.
19 Interview.
20 Interview.
21 Interview.
22 Roberts, Harnessing Competition? 11. On the relationship between union militancy and Canadian State policy, see High, Industrial Sunset.
23 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers.
24 Brooks, “How the UAW Went From a Militant Trailblazing Union to a Corrupt, Dealmaking One.”
25 Whereas the UAW was unable “to define an independent position on competitiveness,” the CAW “transcended” the terms of progressive competitiveness by “partially detach[ing] investment and production decisions from purely market determination.” See Roberts, Harnessing Competition, 11.
26 Interview.
27 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers. The CAW’s ability to resist concessions and its willingness to pursue a more militant track during this period were no doubt helped along by the competitive advantages offered by a low Canadian dollar and public health care. See Holmes and Rusonik, “The Break-up of an International Labour Union”; Wells, “When Push Comes to Shove.” Yet this was probably a less important factor than the “fundamental divergences in union strategy and culture” that had emerged since the 1960s. See Roberts, Harnessing Competition? 26.
28 By the early 1990s, with Canada’s industrial strategy still broadly supporting manufacturing employment, and GM continuing to invest in the Oshawa plant through the mid 1980s despite higher wage costs than in the United States, Oshawa had the lowest income inequality and premature mortality among metropolitan centres in North America and had become a bulwark against the accelerating destruction of secure employment. See Ross et al., “Relation Between Income Inequality and Mortality in Canada and in the United States.”
29 Interview.
30 Interview. By 1959, the communist members of the Oshawa local, who had been key players in the Left caucus, had been politically defeated by moderate candidates sympathetic to Reuther and the international office. See Yates, From Plant to Politics, 272. By the 1980s, radical views and proposals were basically absent from union meetings and were not a relevant part of the debate.
31 Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 83. By thwarting worker power at the shop floor level, the Treaty of Detroit also made developing a class response to neoliberal power relations much more difficult. See Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 83.
32 Panitch and Swartz, From Consent to Coercion.
33 This should not be taken to indicate that Mexico was the only, or even the predominant, low-wage substitute for US auto manufactures. The US South played a very important role in this respect and therefore also served to discipline Canadian workers during this period. In this sense, the growth of Mexican automotive production reflects a wider corporate shift towards the US southern border. Moreover, the shift to Mexican production had deeper roots and did not start in 1994; by the mid-1980s, the auto industry had begun “taking advantage” of Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program (BIP). Established in 1965, the BIP authorized the development of maquiladora plants for foreign-owned companies. See Klier and Rubenstein, “Mexico's Growing Role in the Auto Industry Under NAFTA.”
34 The move to free trade in the 1990s can be easily overexaggerated. While the Auto Pact still served as an important “counter-weight to competitive pressures,” the expansion of the Canadian industry after 1980 probably “owed more to international competitiveness than to constraints on the market.” See Roberts, Harnessing Competition? 887.
35 Through the 1980s, GM “remained the most vertically-integrated automaker.” While it was “implementing its version of lean production” by the late 1980s, the “crisis of the early 1990s… forced the pace” of this restructuring. See Roberts, Harnessing Competition? 858–59.
36 Shields, “GM Outsourcing is a Threat to More Jobs.”
37 The 1996 strike and plant occupation was important in shaping this process of outsourcing, as the union “won work ownership language permitting assemblers to outsource work to independent suppliers so long as the same terms and conditions of work applied to the workers performing the work.” See Roberts, Harnessing Competition, 869, emphasis added.
38 In real terms, this represented slightly more than a 20 percent wage increase over the period.
39 Hoar, “Competitive Work Practices,” 3.
40 Hamer, “Preparations for Negotiations”; Shields, “Committee's Hard Work Pays Off.” On the productivity gains associated with lean production, see Roberts, Harnessing Competition; Kumar, “In Search of Competitive Efficiency.”
41 Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 83.
42 Caines, “The Year In Review.” These numbers might be slightly exaggerated as they can be calculated to produce wide variations. Not only are they influenced by levels of outsourcing, but they also vary based on the vehicle mix favoured by each company because larger vehicles have a longer build time.
43 The pace and intensity of work on the line was perhaps the key workplace issue during this time.
44 While this upheld Canadian access to the North American market, it ultimately marked a further movement from the Canadian production targets set by the original agreement, and further opened the market to European and Asian firms. NAFTA classified foreign products now as anything produced outside North America.
45 This reflects both structural and policy level outcomes—while interest and inflation rates impact the value of the Canadian dollar, it ultimately reflects international demand for Canadian goods.
46 Babson, “Free Trade and Worker Solidarity,” 24.
47 Babson, “Free Trade and Worker Solidarity,” 25; Tuman, Reshaping the North American Automobile Industry.
48 OECD, “Freight Railway Development in Mexico,” 7.
49 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers.
50 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers.
51 Roberts, Harnessing Competition, 866.
52 Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers.
53 Interview.
54 Interview.
55 The local’s conservative tendencies were strong enough that national leaders were concerned Oshawa would vote to remain in the UAW during the recertification process.
56 Shields, “Major Victory For Labour,” 2.
57 To be sure, “shopfloor discontent over the declining quality of working life” and the union’s failure to address key workplace issues were already widely apparent by the late 1990s, as demonstrated by “wildcats at GM Oshawa in October 1999 and in August the following year,” and by the “comparatively low” ratification votes for the 1999 and 2002 contracts. See Roberts, Harnessing Competition, 872.
58 This again raises the question of the relationship between the local and national office. As noted, it is important to see these as interconnected. While the national office was able to lead a progressive agenda during the 1980s, radicalism required a base at the local level, which was not present (though it could have been nurtured through national education programs and other initiatives). Further, while the national office has a certain degree of authority over the locals, the latter are by no means powerless and can push the national office in certain ways. This is especially the case if local leaders are willing to exercise their negative power.
59 These closures were announced one month after the 2005 Collective Agreement was ratified.
60 For a good discussion on the impact of workplace tiering, see Corman et al., “Inequality and Divisions on the Shop Floor.”
61 Gindin, “Big Three Bargaining.” This was converted to 6 years in 2009, 10 years in 2012, and 12 years in 2016. In 2012, the base rate was reduced to 60 percent.
62 Supplemental Employment Benefits topped up the Employment Insurance payments workers received during company-imposed layoffs.
63 Moffatt, “GM Strike Authorization Vote Sunday.”
64 The effect was that many full-time workers were given a 20-year wage progression.
65 By 2019, this group included about 10 different companies. These companies were contracted to provide services such as cleaning, building services, sequencing, and security. These workers comprised about 32 percent of workers inside the plant. See Leah, “Why We Occupied Our General Motors Factory in Oshawa.”
66 Holmes and Carey, “Challenges Confronting the Canadian Automotive Parts Industry.”
67 Rutherford and Holmes, “Engineering Networks”; Rutherford and Holmes, “The Flea on the Tail of the Dog.”
68 McBride, Paradigm Shift.
69 See, for example, Blatchford, “Ottawa’s Stake in General Motors Could Help Slay the Deficit.”
70 Interview. See, also, Rosenfeld, “Canadian Auto Workers Moves from Fighting Back to Cooperating.”
71 Gindin, “Democracy.”
72 Gindin, “Democracy”; Rosenfeld, “Canadian Auto Workers Moves from Fighting Back to Cooperating”; Shields, “Getting It Back In Gear,” 1.
73 See Diaz as quoted in Thomson, “UNIFOR President Praises New Trade Deal.”
74 Shields, “Achieving the Richest Agreement In Local History,” 2; Shields, “Getting It Back In Gear,” 2.
75 The 2009 closure of the truck plant appears to have been a key turning point in the local. It not only drained morale, but resulted in the loss of senior members, many of whom had some connection to the union’s more militant past.
76 For a further discussion of the Caterpillar negotiations, see Ross and Russell, “Caterpillar Hates Unions More Than It Loves Profits.”
77 Roberts, Harnessing Competition? 910.
78 Gindin, “Realizing ‘Just Transitions.’” For a good overview of this campaign and its demands, see Green Jobs Oshawa, “Electric Vehicle Production is Possible in Oshawa.”
79 Gindin, “Realizing ‘Just Transitions.’”
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Scott M. Aquanno
Scott M. Aquanno teaches in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.
Toba Bryant
Toba Bryant teaches in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.