Speech at Vale Inco Strike Support Rally August 4, 2009

First of all I want to thank the USWA for the opportunity to address this very important rally in solidarity with your very important strike. Being here gives me a distinct feeling of deja vu because I clearly remember 1978. I particularly remember being at work and buying a small pin made up of a miniature shovel with a tiny piece of nickel on it. Those pins were sold to raise badly needed money that helped your union to win an eight and a half month long strike. I also remember all of the fundraisers and other events organized on a vast scale to support that strike and I remember the impressive activities in support of the strike engaged in by the strikers' wives support group in Sudbury.

That strike and all that was done in solidarity with it comprised an important lesson in modern Canadian labour history which should inform us all of what is in store for Vale Inco if they do not stop attacking your pensions and specifically if they do not stop attempting to cripple your union by having it agree to sacrifice the pensions of the next generation of workers who will work here after you.

As in 1978 this union busting employer must be taught a lesson about what it is like to deal with real unions and real trade unionists. Real unions and real trade unionists know that our strength comes from defending the interests of the ENTIRE membership and certainly not by sacrificing the well being of the future membership to protect the present membership. Real unions and real trade unionists know that to do otherwise would be to commit suicide by allowing the bosses to roll back gains won through the long bitter struggles of those who came before us.

We as trade unionists are duty bound to honour their legacy. We must likewise honour their achievements by defending their gains. We must remember what they learned through struggle and that is that workers did not form unions to go backwards. Workers formed unions to defend their dignity, to defend what they have and to move forwards whenever possible. It logically follows that it is imperative for each and every one of us to do everything we can to make certain your struggle is successful.
You can be certain that the St. Catharines & District Labour Council will not sit on the sidelines during this critical struggle. We will be with you not just in words but in actions for as long as it takes because we know that no one is neutral in a struggle like this and we know which side WE are on. Fight to win.

Bruce Allen
President
St. Catharines & District Labour Council

Asbestos: GM St. Catharines Cancer Cluster Backgrounder

From the late 1950s (and perhaps earlier) until approximately the mid-1980s General Motors workers working on the Brake Bonding Assembly Line and the adjacent Caliper Assembly Line located on the West Side of the Components Plant in St. Catharines, Ontario continuously assembled brake assemblies containing asbestos brake linings. On the Brake Bonding Assembly Line these asbestos brake linings were continually ground to a specified thickness on grinding machines. Holes were continually drilled in these brake linings. Rivets were continually punched into them in order to be able to attach these linings to brake shoes for assembly.

Following this the brake shoes with these asbestos linings attached to them were moved to the adjacent Caliper Assembly line for further assembly and were then transported to the Final Disc Brake Assembly line located elsewhere on the West Side of the Components Plant. The final assemblies built there would then leave the department.

These processes resulted in the Brake Bonding Assembly Line and the Caliper Assembly Line being saturated with asbestos fibres. These fibres could be conspicuously seen everywhere in the immediate area including in the air the workers breathed.

Simply stated the assembly workers employed on these assembly lines would engage in continuous physical contact with asebstos every day they worked and would likewise inhale asbestos fibres as they worked. Skilled trades workers who worked on the machines involved in these assembly processes also came into direct physical contact with asbestos fibres in a major way and would inhale asbestos fibres on a continuous basis. It is also noteworthy that airborne asbestos fibres were inevitably not confined to the immediate area and would have circulated throughout the West Side of the Components Plant to an undetermined extent.

Some twenty five or more workers worked on these two assembly operations per shift when they were running with a full crew. Throughout most of the years that asbestos brake linings were used in these assembly operations there were two or more shifts per day. Full crews working on two shifts and a partial crew on the midnight shift were not unusual.

Accordingly it would not be an exageration to state that throughout the decades long time span during which asbestos brake linings were in use thousands of workers were employed in these operations at one time or another. A considerable number of workers were employed in these operations for most of their career at General Motors and a great many of them were women.

Health and safety precautions were minimal. Prior to the late 1970s the workers working with the asbestos brake linings did so without any awareness whatsoever of the risks involved. They routinely used air hoses to blow asebestos fibres off of the machines they worked on and away from the work stations where they did their jobs. There were even occasions when asbestos fibres were tossed around like sand as the workers engaged in horseplay. Open air lunch tables where the workers ate were situated right next to the assembly lines and even close to the machines which drilled holes in and ground the asbestos linings. Most workers personal protective equipment consisted of no more than safety glasses, safety shoes, gloves and ear plugs.

General Motors knew there was a problem by the end of the 1970s. The company had people working in the immediate area at that time undergo x-rays. Very limited changes to working conditions were implemented. Vacuuming of the area began to be done on the day shift. Electric tow motors were brought into the area to replace gas tow motors because the emmisions from gas tow motors contributed to the problem of the asbestos fibres becoming airborne. But those measures were about the extent of the remedial changes to working conditions that were made.

Significantly the danger to the workers did not end with the cessation of the use of asbestos brake linings in brake assemblies approximately in the mid-1980s. Airborne asbestos fibres were still present in the area years later. General Motors' hygenist has acknowledged the continued presence of asbestos in the area up to the early 1990s. Asbestos fibres are likely still present in the area to this day on overhead ceiling pipes.

Nonetheless those who have been most at risk are obviously the workers who worked in the area prior to the mid-1980s. With the latency period associated with asbestos related occupational diseases this means that we are now in a time period when a cluster of asbestos related cancers could be expected to emerge. This is precisely what is happening today.

Prior to 2007 there were undoubtedly asbestos related deaths affecting workers who had been employed on these assembly lines. But it is impossible to determine the extent to which such deaths occurred.

Then in late 2007 an otherwise healthy retired machine repair employee developed respiratory problems. He was seen by a surgeon at a local hospital in St. Catharines who, following diagnostic imaging, asked him whether he had worked in the mines. The worker had not. He was perplexed by the question. Following subsequent discussion of his problem and of his work history with myself it was apparent that the problem was traceable back to the years he worked in the 1970s repairing machines on the Brake Bonding Assembly Line. While performing repairs on those machines he had had routine and extensive, direct exposure to the asbestos fibres permeating the area at the time. He was then diagnosed with mesothelioma making it obvious that there could only be one cause of his disease. Accordingly the worker had no difficulty getting a Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) claim for mesothelioma allowed. Sadly he died just months later.

In the same time period a retired Toolmaker who had also worked in the same area of the Components Plant also filed and had a worker's compensation claim for mesothelioma allowed. This claim was allowed despite the fact that he was now residing in Britain where he still lives.

These developments prompted me to actively encourage workers who had been exposed to asbestos, particularly in these assembly operations, to come forward and document their history of exposure using the WSIB's Workers Exposure Incident Forms. Dozens of active and retired workers came forward and did. Their personal accounts resulted in the compilation of a large, compelling body of evidence of the extent and duration of workers' exposure to asbestos on the West Side of the General Motors Components Plant not to mention of the employer's failure to effectively address the problem.

Recently another of the workers who worked in the area developed a brain tumour. She developed the tumour after having developed lung cancer. Lung cancer was diagnosed as her primary cancer. A biopsy concluded that she had metastatic cancer (small cell type).

This worker had worked for years on the Brake Bonding and Caliper Assembly Lines. Her exposure to asbestos throughout that time was considerable and its duration met the threshold established by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board for allowing a claim for lung cancer. Significantly the Workers Exposure Incident Form the worker had filed was one of the documents in the file for her WSIB lung cancer claim.

Most importantly in the decision to allow the worker's claim the WSIB Claims Adjudicator explicitly acknowledged the existence of a cancer cluster among the workers who had worked on the Brake Bonding and Caliper Assembly Lines. This should prove to be a pivotal development in terms of the prospects for the allowance of future cancer claims for the workers who had been exposed to asbestos while working on these assembly lines.

The tragedy of all of this is that many more WSIB claims by active and retired General Motors Components Plant workers for asbestos related cancer are likely to be allowed over the coming years. Indeed one of the retired workers who provided a signed statement about the extent of the presence of asbestos fibres where he and the woman worker referred to above had worked wryly told me well over a year ago that because of his many years of work in the very same area on the West Side of the General Motors Components Plant he considered himself “a walking time bomb”. One can only hope that his words do not prove to be prophetic.

Bruce Allen
Vice-President
Canadian Auto Workers Local 199
May 12, 2009

Contract Concessions and the Crisis in Auto

For years I have been writing articles and talking at a meetings concerning developments in the auto industry in Canada. I have consistently presented a set of arguments built around a longstanding observation that I have made concerning what is happening in the auto industry. I have argued that the multinational auto corporations have been using their control over investment decisions to systematically dismantle and take away all of the gains made by North American autoworkers since the United Auto Workers (UAW) was born in the mid-1930s. This means that these corporations have been withholding their capital in order to advance their agenda in a way not so unlike the way we as autoworkers used to either withhold our labour or threaten to withhold our labour in order to advance our collective bargaining agenda and make and build upon gains.

But in recent years the tables have been turned. The collective bargaining process in the North American auto industry has been stood on its head. We as autoworkers no longer go to the bargaining table in order to win our demands. We go to the bargaining table in order to address the corporations’ demands in the hope of securing new work and remaining employed. Or at least that is what has been happening.

In 2009 this situation has gone from bad to worse for autoworkers. As retired Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Research Director Sam Gindin recently observed, “It used to be that corporations promised jobs for concessions; now they aggressively demand more concessions alongside fewer jobs.”

The brutal reality of the situation is that this is where the trajectory of concessions bargaining has taken us since it began to really develop in the industry in Canada in 1993 and more than a decade before that in the United States. In Canada that development immediately followed the announcement of a massive restructuring of General Motors North American operations in 1992 and logically coincided with auto corporations in Canada engaging in a concerted drive to extract contract concessions at the local level in order to gut local collective agreements and weaken the power of the union on the shop floor. Significantly and quite logically as well these developments also coincided with the North American auto corporations’ relentless drive to implement variants of the Toyota Production System and other lean work reorganization strategies in their operations.

One set of concessionary collective agreements at the local level followed another throughout the 1990s in Canada and this phenomenon has continued into the current decade. This process has not only continued. It has has deepened. These concessionary collective agreements have crippled the power of the union on the shop floor of Canadian auto plants and beat the union into a state of increasing submission not so unlike what has happened in the U.S. since the beginning of the 1980s. This state of increasing submission has been reflected in the wholesale abandonment of an adversarial relationship by local unions toward the automotive employers. Consequently, the union’s agenda, particularly at the local level, has evolved and become more and more indistinguishable from management’s agenda.

Locally managements have responded by consciously taking advantage of this weakening of the union’s power on the shop floor due to both this ongoing weakening of our local agreements and to workers’ pervasive fear of job losses by shrewdly and meticulously integrating shop floor union leaderships into the process of managing operations without compromising management’s agenda. Increasingly rank and file workers have found it harder to tell the difference between the message they hear from in-plant union leaderships and what they hear from the boss. As a result of this the corporations have increasingly prevailed in the battle for the hearts and minds of the automotive workforce. They have increasingly achieved ideological hegemony because the union no longer has an identifiable agenda of its own given that securing and retaining work at any price has increasingly become the sole priority of auto union leadership locally and Canada wide.

This puts in context the efforts of the CAW leadership to constantly promote and encourage handouts of government monies to the auto corporations in order to attract new investment in auto plants in Canada. This likewise puts in context the conspicuous absence of any open criticism whatosever of these corporations by the CAW simultaneous with and reinforcing this advocacy of government handouts to them. Very significantly a fundamental truth has been forgotten along the way. Namely, that when the agenda of the union becomes essentially one and the same as the agenda of the employer the very reason for the union to exist as an independent entity is effectively called into question.

This brings me to the developments of approximately the past 24 months. In addressing them I am compelled to focus on GM in Canada with some reference to developments in my own local union. I do this knowing that these local developments are typical of what is going on generally in the industry in Canada.

The brutal truth of the matter is that the CAW has now engaged in four sets of concessionary contract bargaining with GM in approximately the last two years. In doing so this has born out something former CAW National President Buzz Hargrove said about two years ago when he remarked to the CAW’s national council that nowadays in the auto industry we are always negotiating. Significantly in saying this Hargrove displayed amnesia on his part by forgetting that such a practice has been in effect for many years in the U.S. where the United Auto Workers has been negotiating what are called Modern Operating Agreements. Modern Operating Agreements involve the continuous negotiation of contract concessions designed to enhance the competitiveness of local operations and to ostensibly improve their chances of survival.

That said the first of these four sets of concessionary negotiations with GM were conducted at the local level in Oshawa, Ontario via what was termed a “shelf agreement” and then in St. Catharines, Ontario via what was called a “Competitive Operating Agreement”. Both of the resulting local agreements gutted and rewrote existing local collective agreements from start to finish giving the corporation almost everything it wanted locally in exchange for the promise of new work. In St. Catharines this meant new transmission work that has yet to arrive and which has been put off until 2012 and may never arrive give the state of the industry. In Oshawa this yielded work on a new Camaro.

Next in March 2008 then CAW National President Buzz Hargrove opened the 2008 contract negotiations half a year early. He did so based upon a belief that collective bargaining would be tougher when the existing contracts with the Detroit 3 expired in the autumn of 2008.

This was a pivotal turning point. We went from negotiating one set of concessionary local collective agreements to negotiating major contract concessions at the corporation wide or master level. Wages and pensions were frozen. Cost of Living Allowances (COLA) increases were “temporarily” suspended. A week’s vacation per year was given up. Starting wage rates were lowered from 85% of the established rate for each job classification to 70% of the established rate with the full rate to be paid only after three years of service. All the while the union leadership proclaimed that it had successfully resisted a United Auto Workers (UAW) style two tier wage and benefit structure involving drastically reduced starting rates of pay and benefit entitlements for new hires. Most importantly, co-pays for benefits were substantially increased with the amounts of money to be paid by workers increasing in each successive year of the collective agreements thereby setting the stage for continuous increases in these co-pays.

Then came last year’s global economic meltdown. Following it and the ensuing global capitalist crisis the CAW was back at it again in March 2009 giving even more contract concessions. At GM the union conceded about $7.00 per hour in wage and benefit concessions. The contract was extended for another year with no wage or pension increases meaning we actually now had a 4 year contract. This effectively marked the end of the CAW’s long standing, very vocal opposition to long term collective agreements meaning agreements of more than three years duration. Our Xmas bonus was negotiated away. Additional co-pays on benefits were introduced. The door was open to a Canadian version of the UAW’s Voluntary Employeee Benefits Association (VEBA) which relieves corporations of full, direct responsibility for employee benefits and effectively guarantees the ongoing erosion of benefits via underfunding of this separate benefit fund. Coverage for long term care was reduced. Dental benefits were frozen at 2008 levels through to 2012.

Despite all of these giveaways they were still not enough in the view of Chrysler and the U.S. and Canadian governments. Chrysler wanted $19.00 per hour worth of wage and benefit contract concessions citing labour costs at Japanese transplants in North America. The Canadian and Ontario provincial governments supported Chrysler’s position and put a gun to the union’s head saying there would be no government money for the cash strapped corporations in Canada otherwise. The CAW quickly gave in to them.

With the resulting much more concessionary collective agreements at Chrysler in April newly hired employees will have to work 6 years before getting the established full rate of pay. New hires will now also have $1.00 per hour deducted from their wages to go to pay for their pensions if and when they retire. Their pensions will be capped at the amounts paid out for 30 years of credited service meaning you can work 40 years and will still get the pension of someone who has worked only 30 years. The waiting period for Sickness & Accident benefits was increased. Semi-private hospital care was eliminated. Refunds on education tuition for family members were reduced. A rebate paid to employees for new car purchases will end. The establishment of a VEBA to administer benefits went from being an item for discussion to a certainty.

Worst of all contractual language was negotiated at the corporate wide or Master Level to allow for local arrangements where outside suppliers will be able to locate on site at and even inside Chrysler plants just like the experimental plants in Brazil developed by Ignacio Lopez formerly of Volkswagen in the 1990s. This supplier park concept will produce outsourcing of our work on a huge scale and devastate the power of the union on the shop floor of Detroit 3 auto plants in Canada.

Then in a matter of weeks these sweeping contract concessions were suddenly deemed to be not enough for General Motors even though GM’s CEO had previously said that the contract concessions negotiated with the CAW in March were good enough. The Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments adopted the same position.

This brings us to where we are today. Namely we are faced with further concessions particularly affecting pensions at GM which have even exceeded those contract concessions negotiated at Chrysler. If these additional concessions are not subsequently matched at Chrysler then there will no longer be a pattern collective agreement in the auto industry in Canada ending a practice of negotiating industry wide collective agreements that has been absolutely critical to all of the gains North American autoworkers have made in the past. If they are to be matched then it will mean that the CAW will have to go back to the negotiating table at Chrysler. Ford of Canada meanwhile is sitting back waiting for the cascade of contract concessions to end at their competitors. Ford of Canada has publicly made it clear that it fully expects to get just as much and the CAW leadership at Ford is preparing to deliver similar concessions and will try to scare its membership into accepting them.

In short Canadian autoworkers are being assaulted at a breathtaking pace. What is more the cascade of contract concessions will certainly continue because, as I indicated, the establishment of a VEBA for healthcare benefits means there will be an erosion of our benefits on an ongoing basis. This is due to the certainty of inadequate funding of the VEBA because when health care costs rise due to inflation additional monies to cover the additional benefit costs will not be put into the fund making reductions in benefits unavoidable. The downward spiral for Canadian autoworkers consequently has no end in sight unless and until the union’s rank and file finally says no to these corporations; corporations in the case of GM and Chrysler who will likely emerge from bankruptcy protection to become very profitable again.

In short autoworkers never created this crisis. We are in no way responsible for it. But we are paying the price for this crisis in the auto industry with a cascade of contract concessions on a monumental scale.

What is taking place is a quintessential example of Capital taking advantage of a crisis for which it bears sole responsibility in order to deal a historic and crushing blow to workers who have led the way for the entire working class. Accordingly the emerging outcome of these developments will be a historic setback for the entire working class in Canada comparable in its potential consequences to the defeat of the air traffic controllers in the United States in 1981 at the hands of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of the British coal miners in 1985 by Margret Thatcher. It logically follows that what we should be seeing is all of organized labour in Canada and beyond mobilizing to support Canadian autoworkers in the face of this enormous onslaught we are being subjected to.

Accordingly in view of these things the relative silence of the leadership of almost all of the rest of the labour movement in Canada in response to this onslaught is worse than reprehensible. It is treacherous. Likewise the response from the leadership of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) in Canada has been grotesquely inadequate with the leader of provincial Ontario NDP being virtually alone in coming to the defense of autoworkers and then doing so only to a very limited extent with regard to the issue of protecting autoworker pensions.

Simply stated we are isolated in the face of this historic onslaught. The situation could hardly be worse. Disaster is staring us immediately in the face because we are in the process of being crippled and essentially all we are getting in response from our leadership are exercises in damage control and empty rhetoric about fighting again another day and possibly regaining some of the things we have just lost. Indeed it is absolutely impossible to take any of their claims about fighting again another day seriously given the duration, extent and acceleration of the retreat which has been taking place and the auto and labour leadership’s general unwillingness to mobilize the membership and confront Capital in response to its onslaught against us.

To the contrary, as previously indicated, in the auto industry we have a union leadership very much in the habit of helping to scare the membership into accepting one set of concessionary collective agreements after another all the while stating that there is no alternative. They do this while knowing full well and sometimes even acknowledging that making government economic aid to the auto industry contingent upon workers taking contract concessions is a phenomenon unique to Canada and the United States. They know that even right-wing governments in countries like Germany and France would not dare to attach such conditions to aid for the auto industry. Workers and their unions in those countries would absolutely not stand for it and would be too likely to wage fightbacks that would terrify any government. Indeed Opel workers in Germany are not facing demands for contract concessions and Opel is subsidiary of GM.

What is more the option of public ownership of the industry is not even being considered let alone being seriously advocated as an alternative worth fighting for. This is the case even while tens of billions of dollars of government monies are being poured into GM and Chrysler.

In conclusion we are currently witnessing three related crises. One is the global economic crisis of capitalism. A second is the crisis specific to the auto industry. This second crisis simply would not exist in North America were it not for last year’s economic meltdown, the very costly privatized American health care system and the disproportionate number of retired workers relative to active workers in the plants; a phenomenon that exists entirely due to corporate decisions designed to lower the age of the workforce and avoid the training costs that would be generated by the layoff of low seniority workers and the retraining of those who replaced them on their jobs.

The third crisis is a worsening crisis of leadership in the Canadian labour movement. This is clearly demonstrated by these events unfolding before our eyes, particularly in the auto industry, and by the wholly ineffectual response of the current labour leadership to it. In other words the crisis of the labour movement is a crisis of labour leadership.

Speech in Youngstown Ohio July 1999

I am going to focus on something I see as a fatal weakness in the response of organized labour in Ontario, and Canada, to Capital’s offensive against Labour and the latest consequence of this. Yesterday the most aggressively right-wing government in the history of Ontario was re-elected with a decisive majority. The Harris government has not just waged a war on the poor, pursued horrific environmental policies and attacked basic workers’ rights for the past four years. It has aggressively pursued and plans to continue to pursue a restructuring agenda that fully incorporates the deployment of corporate work reorganization strategies like reengineering.

The pit bulls of the Harris government have been talking the talk of work reorganization throughout their time in office and they have put their words into action. The blueprint for their second term of office parodies the logic of the Toyota Production System by saying their goal is to make government “work smarter, faster and better”. It calls for bringing in more efficient management systems. Given current management theory this definitely means things like T.Q.M. Their spokespersons have also talked about breaking down “the silo mentality” which clearly indicates a familiarity with the theory of reengineering. They also talk about benchmarking which, in effect, means relentless efforts at continuous improvement or the continuous pursuit of new ways of working to squeeze more work out of fewer workers. Doing better with less is their stated objective.

The Harris government’s infatuation with benchmarking was apparent early in its first term of office. This was exemplified by the government’s omnibus bill, Bill 26, which was designed to facilitate the radical and sweeping restructuring of the public sector in Ontario. Entire sections of Bill 26 were devoted to benchmarking.
Furthermore, consistent with the practice of reengineering, the Ontario government took away powers from small, local governments and concentrated them in what is commonly referred to as “the centre ” or the backrooms of their regime where the real decision-making takes place. The Harris government has done this with a conscious desire to establish benchmarks or “best practices” and force them on local governments via legislation like Bill 26.

My point simply is that these things comprise a very major part of the Harris government’s agenda. My point is also to highlight that they pose a very serious problem for the labour movement in Ontario and Canada. Namely, its total failure to seriously acknowledge, never mind grasp, these critically important features of what is Harris’ or Capital’s current agenda.

This failure by the labour movement to adequately come to terms with the Harris agenda was painfully evident in 1997 during the fight against yet another piece of Harris government legislation designed to facilitate the restructuring and downsizing of the public sector, Bill 136. The union bureaucracy’s initial response to Bill 136 raised the spectre of a public sector general strike. But the union bureaucracy raised this spectre because Bill 136 was going to legally deny public sector workers’ the right to strike during the restructuring process. The union bureaucracy also did this because Bill 136 would have taken the responsibility for resolving public sector labour disputes away from the O.L.R.B. and given that responsibility to new bodies beholden directly to the Harris government and its fiscal goals.

Significantly, no general strike was ever seriously planned nor did momentum towards one develop. This inaction happened, in large part, because the Harris Tories agreed to withdraw the part of the bill taking away the right of public sector workers to strike. Significantly, the Tories did this after the leader of the largest public sector union in Ontario, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, repeatedly gave the government commitments that there would be no strikes during the restructuring. In other words, the leader of CUPE Ontario made a ban on strikes completely unnecessary. There was also no general strike because the Harris Tories made a minor concession by agreeing to continue to use the existing state structures to deal with public sector labour disputes and, in effect, enforce labour legislation they had crafted and implemented.

The union bureaucracy bombastically responded by claiming victory. The Ontario leader of the C.U.P.E. shortly thereafter declared the Harris government’s program, known as the Common Sense Revolution, to be over and dead. Yesterday we found out just how dead it is.

Meanwhile the Harris Tories massive restructuring of the public sector went ahead and some 16,000 public sector jobs were restructured out of existence as a result. Significantly, the Harris government had made it clear throughout the uproar over Bill 136 that it did not care much about the final form of the legislation as long as it got the government to where it wanted to go in terms of restructuring the public sector. That is precisely where it went.

My point is simple. Capital’s pit bulls in the Harris government had an agenda based in large measure upon reengineering and the radical restructuring of work processes in the public sector. The union bureaucracy, led by people who plainly don’t understand these things, had no effective counter strategy tailored to the Harris government's agenda. Consequently, the union bureaucracy only secured insignificant and cosmetic victories. Ultimately, Harris routed the membership of the public sector unions.
Furthermore, had the public sector unions not been routed we may not have seen the election results we saw yesterday. But we did and I am saying to you that the union bureaucracy bears direct responsibility for the decisive re-election of an openly Thatcherite government ultimately committed to crippling the labour movement in Ontario.

These things said some comments are definitely in order about the social democratic New Democratic Party in relation to the developments I’ve described in Mike Harris’ Ontario and in relation to the broader phenomenon of restructuring and work reorganization within the context of capitalist globalization.

The Ontario NDP’s criticisms of the Harris government’s agenda, since the Tories’ election in 1995, have differed little from those of the union bureaucracy. Worse still, to the extent that they have differed it is because the NDP leadership is to the right of the union bureaucracy.
None of this should have been surprising because the NDP had just held power and, while it held power, it engaged in its own public sector restructuring efforts designed to downsize the public sector and do so at the direct expense of the democratic rights of workers. Furthermore, in sectors like health care, public sector management in Ontario also engaged in reengineering and it aggressively promoted anti-worker obscenities like teams and TQM. All of this happened with the blessing of the NDP government of the day.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Canada other NDP governments did and are continuing to do the very same types of things. Reengineering is an ongoing phenomenon in the health care sector in British Columbia, where the NDP has been in power throughout the 1990s. B.C.’s NDP government is also a strong promoter of private – public partnerships in health care according to the President of the B.C. Nurses Union Catherine Ferguson, who I recently spoke to at length on this and related subjects.
Then there is the situation in Saskatchewan. That province is the birthplace of social democracy in Canada. I think I only need to tell you that a year after Mike Harris was elected as the Premier of Ontario he spoke to the infamous right-wing, corporate think tank, the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. The purpose of his speech was to make a progress report on the implementation of his government’s agenda. Harris told his audience of corporate admirers that when the Ontario Tories formulated their Common Sense Revolution for Ontario they had looked to Saskatchewan, where the NDP has been in power for a decade, to find their model for restructuring the health care system in Ontario.

Just consider the implications of this for the labour movement in Canada. This shows that a viciously right-wing government in Ontario committed to reengineering and radically downsizing the public sector drew inspiration and ideas from a government formed by the same political party the union bureaucracy champions. Indeed, this is the party it dogmatically holds up as a genuine alternative around which we should be rallying and which we should be working to elect. What a testament to the political bankruptcy of the union bureaucracy and what a testament to its abysmal failure to even begin to come to terms with the restructuring agenda being deployed against workers with devastating consequences. I believe this definitively shows that, contrary to what many here in the U.S. think, the labour movement in Canada is hopelessly adrift and is in a state of absolute but totally unacknowledged crisis.
Sadly, there is even more to be said in this respect. When it comes to considering this subject in relation to the central labour organization in Canada, the Canadian Labour Congress, I have a real problem. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry in response. The truth of the matter is that pathetic. One only needs to make a quick overview of recent developments with respect to the CLC’s policy or lack thereof on work reorganization.

The CLC addressed the issue of work reorganization in a trite and inconclusive way in its 1996 Constitutional Convention’s Action Plan by noting the growth of part time, term/contract and homework and by correctly relating these phenomena to downsizing, tech change and work reorganization. The 1996 CLC Action Plan acknowledged that work reorganization poses “serious problems” for unions. It also said that it created opportunities for unions without, however, in any way defining what these so-called opportunities are? I wonder why?

The most candid part of this small portion of the CLC’s Action Plan made reference to teams, multi-skilling and multi-tasking plainly admitting that organized labour has found them “disorienting”. These things said the 1996 CLC Action Plan’s bold conclusion was that the resulting issues “need to be discussed on a movement-wide basis”.

In the three years since the 1996 CLC Action Plan was adopted as policy no such discussions on a movement-wide basis have openly taken place let alone with meaningful rank and file worker input. Consequently, we have seen no results of such discussions and if any discussions did take place they were held behind closed doors and those were brought to an effective halt.

All of this became brutally apparent at the 1999 CLC Constitutional Convention in Toronto last month. The only text dealing with work reorganization made available to the delegates was the text of a resolution on work reorganization written by the CLC Left Opposition and adopted by my CAW local, my labour council and two other local unions. It appeared in the Resolutions Book but predictably never made it to the floor of the convention.

Meanwhile, the CLC’s 1999 Action Plan, the main policy document of the convention, totally ducked the question. Yet everyone who was at the convention is from or represents a workplace or workplaces that are being profoundly transformed by Captial’s work reorganization blitzkrieg. And I should add that when I went to one of the microphones during the debate of the Action Plan and attacked it for this gaping omission, and for other reasons, the response was near silence.
The CLC, like the union bureaucracy in general, is totally bankrupt on this question. The result is a huge and strategically critical policy void that has directly contributed to the kinds of disastrous defeats I’ve noted in Ontario. And make no mistake about it, as time goes on the consequences of this void will be more and more disastrous.

The reason for this is very simple and very basic from a labour perspective. The continuing failure of unions to effectively address the changes wrought by the relentless deployment of corporate work reorganization strategies is leading to, and can only lead to, a steady decline in the power of unions on the shop floor. Furthermore, an ongoing loss of union power on the shop floor inevitably causes unions to cease to be dynamic and thriving class-based organizations capable of taking effective action both in the workplace and in society at large. This is so simply because workers measure the unions they belong to primarily by the ability of these unions to affect what happens in their immediate workplace and to them in their jobs.
This plain fact stands at the very centre of everything I am saying here. Indeed, recognition of this led to the effort to follow up on the formation of a viable Left Caucus in the Canadian Autoworkers union (formed partly in response to the CAW’s increasing inclination to reconcile itself to lean manufacturing) and kick start a left opposition focused on the Canadian Labour Congress Convention. This is now a formation that aspires to give rise to a potent left opposition throughout the Canadian labour movement.

Briefly, the CLC Left Opposition was formed just over half a year ago and it has already held two public events. More are planned. We also succeeded in sending about 20 resolutions to last month’s CLC Constitutional Convention with the support of two labour councils and five local unions. Fourteen of these made it into the resolutions book and two were incorporated verbatim into composite resolutions adopted by the convention. One of these resolutions dealt with the plight of AIM leader Leonard Peltier. And it has since become very clear that our efforts to mobilize in solidarity with Leonard Peltier, in large measure, pushed the CLC to once again take up his case in a meaningful way after many years of negligence. We also brought two women involved in a protracted UNITE! strike against concessions and blatant gender discrimination to the convention to mobilize support for their struggle much to the dismay of the UNITE! bureaucracy in Canada and without the blessing of the CLC leadership.

Most importantly, we are continuing to plan and to organize and have established a small but very significant network of employed and under employed and unionized and non-unionized workers that extends throughout most of Canada. Our main tools in doing this are a web site we constructed with an e-mail discussion list open to anyone interested in being part of it and the use of the Labournet Canada web site where many of our documents and links to our web site can be found. This means we have the kind of infrastructure necessary for building a real opposition across the country and really turning it into a potent force. And, I might add, that in this respect we have an organizing capability far superior to anything which any other left formation that has appeared in the Canadian labour movement have ever had, including the tiresome formations which were initiated by the Communist Party of Canada.

Beyond that we have a core of highly experienced labour activists many of whom hold significant and influential positions in either local unions and or labour councils. In short, we have a real base to build on. Furthermore, given the depth of the crisis within the Canadian labour movement, manifested by the types of things I’ve outlined here, we have very fertile soil to work with in building such an opposition. And, I am convinced, we can build such an opposition.

Such an opposition can be built by being aggressive, determined, and outspoken worker activists. And it can be built by effectively addressing absolutely crucial issues, like work reorganization, where the union bureaucracy has fallen flat on its face and where it will most definitely continue to fall flat on its face to the detriment of the entire Canadian working class. Thank you.

Post Seattle: The Fallout from Quebec City 2001

The Fallout from Quebec City

The recent anti – Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) protests in Quebec City saw a new generation of radical youth make a mark on this country no less significant than the one left by American youth in Seattle a year and a half earlier. These young activists firmly established the existence of a very significant extra – parliamentary social force that both rattled those in power and left the union bureaucracy in Canada reeling. As such the events in Quebec City were a defining moment for the labour movement in Canada.

The young militants who mobilized in Quebec City spearheaded what became an impressive manifestation of anti-capitalist social resistance in the face of the largest mobilization of repressive force by the Canadian state since Pierre Trudeau imposed the War Measures Act in 1970. Yet all of this repressive force did not deter the young militants who were on the front lines in Quebec City. To the contrary, it inspired their courage and heroism. It steeled their determination. They were also not deterred by the fact that the union bureaucracy, with a few notable exceptions, was just as determined to avoid even the semblance of a confrontation.

In effect, the union bureaucracy not only witheld its support of the youth on the front lines. It denied them a real measure of protection against the riot police by leading the massive legal march against the FTAA as far away as possible from the riot police and the “Wall of Shame” erected in downtown Quebec City to “protect” the would be architects of the FTAA.

In view of this it was only fitting that the demonstration led by the union bureaucracy proved to be woefully ineffective and politically insignificant. Organized labour came away with a semblance of credibility. This was the case only because a significant minority of the union activists, local union leadership and a handful of full time union officials would not tolerate the unfolding labour farce. They broke ranks with the state - sanctioned march to join the youth being attacked on the front lines of the struggle in Quebec City.

Significantly, most of the trade unionists who defied the union bureaucracy were relatively young workers. There was, in effect, a divide between generations. It separated those who were determined to accomplish something meaningful from those who, willingly or not, opted to avoid confrontation and received the cynical approval of those who had deployed so much repressive force in Quebec City.

Political Fallout

The resulting political fallout within organized labour has been profound and unprecedented. This was vividly apparent less than two weeks after the battle in Quebec City.

On May 3 an impressive, overflow crowd of over 700 people packed an auditorium at Ryerson College in downtown Toronto to hear a panel of speakers address the question After Quebec City: What Next? Many of those in attendance were young militants who had faced the tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon fired by the riot police.

The most notable speaker was Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) leader Carol Phillips. She read the text of e-mails sent to the CAW National Office by CAW activists venting their frustration and anger at having been led as far away as possible from the Wall of Shame during the legal march. These CAW activists had gone to Quebec City determined to make a powerful political statement not to turn their backs on those genuinely taking on the fight to stop the FTAA.

Carol Phillips proceeded to declare for all to hear that labour was “embarrassed and ashamed” by what had happened in Quebec City. Her stunning admission was greeted by a standing ovation by many in the crowd. She went on to commit that the CAW would adopt a more militant, confrontational role in such situations in the future. She even said CAW activists were going to form affinity groups during future protests.

Others in the union bureaucracy have made their embarrassment known only very quietly by, at most, acknowledging that a mistake had been made. No one else has yet declared that the union leadership will do things differently in the future. Not even other prominent CAW leaders. And in the absence of such a declaration there is no reason to believe organized labour will effectively stand as one in the future with the heroic youth who are leading the fight in North America against capitalist globalization. The union bureaucracy is destined to remain a steadfast pillar of the existing social order and thereby facilitate the continued advance of capitalist globalization.

What we can realistically look forward to in the aftermath of Quebec City are much greater numbers of workers at the base of the labour movement, along with some local leadership, linking up with and bolstering the young militants who can be counted upon to press the struggle forward. It logically follows that this convergence process should not only be actively encouraged in every possible way but done so with the complementary goals of giving it a more organized form and a more clearly focused political direction.

In the process ongoing analysis of and principled debate about this developing anti-capitalist movement will be indispensable to its advance. This will hold true both with regard to its immediate objectives, such as stopping the FTAA, and beyond meaning successfully challenging the rule of the architects of obscenities like the proposed FTAA and the broader process of capitalist globalization.

Bruce Allen is the Vice – President of CAW Local 199 in St. Catharines, Ontario.

1998: Responding to David Orchard on Free Trade

Nationalism and Internationalism in the Fight Against Free Trade (A Reply to David Orchard of Canadians Concerned About Free Trade)

It has been almost a decade and a half since Canadian nationalists began to lead the fight against the free trade phenomenon. Canadian nationalists have very little to show for their efforts. Both the 1988 Canada - U.S. Free Trade Agreement and its successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement became entrenched facts of life in this country. Furthermore, the success of those who promoted these trade agreements has given these people the confidence to champion what has been aptly termed NAFTA on steroids or the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.



Having said this I want to make it very clear that I largely agree with David Orchard and Gordon Coggins' views concerning the overwhelmingly detrimental effects of free trade but would suggest that if they want to see the worst it has created they should tour Mexico's infamous Maquiladora Zone. I also agree with them about the desirability of getting out from underneath the shackles of the N.A.F.T.A. and stopping the M.A.I. However, I substantially disagree with them and other Canadian nationalists with regard to the way to fight free trade and the global corporate agenda that lies behind it.



I believe I have a positive view of the struggle against free trade. I say that because I believe the free trade phenomenon exemplifies the fact that in every challenge lies an opportunity. And the opportunity we are presented with is to build cross border solidarity in opposition to the global corporate agenda. But what, in practical terms, does this mean and why is cross border solidarity the way to go in order to really advance the fight against free trade and the global corporate agenda that lies behind it?


The simplest ways for me to explain what cross border solidarity means is for me to tell you about an organization I have belonged to for more than five years and to point to a very concrete example of success in the fight against free trade. The organization is the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM). It was formed in 1989. It has played and continues to play a key role in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, in Mexico in opposition to the N.A.F.T.A. The CJM is comprised of over 100 labour, social justice, women's, environmental, and religious organizations in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. It is a very large, broadly based tri-national organization with a strategic perspective that is not rooted in economic nationalism. It is based on internationalism and solidarity with the victims of the global corporate agenda. In a very real sense, the CJM's strategic perspective implicitly recognizes that if you are serious about taking on what is a global corporate agenda you must be prepared to struggle against that agenda on a scale comparable to the scale of the activities of those who are implementing it.



This brings me to the one clear and unequivocal success story to date in the fight against free trade. In discussing it I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this success was not scored in this country and in no way was a result of economic nationalism. Indeed, its occurrence had everything to do with sustained cross border solidarity in the fight against the effects of free trade and the defense of those who are the most victimized by it. I'm talking about workers and particularly workers in Mexico.


I am referring to the recent defeat suffered by the Clinton Administration in its attempt to get Congressional approval for "fast track" legislation. That legislation would have given Slick Willy in the White House the power to negotiate new trade deals extending the jurisdiction of the NAFTA and put those new trade deals to a vote without giving the U.S. Congress a chance to amend them first. The defeat of fast track was a huge and long overdue embarrassment for the Clinton Administration. More importantly, it was an even bigger defeat for those who are promoting free trade. This defeat of free trade has also proven to be very revealing. I say this because there has been no substantive discussion or analysis of it by the opponents of free trade in this country. And one must ask why? To be honest with you I'm not sure why. But I tend to think that those who base their opposition to free trade on economic nationalism are inclined to have a rather narrow vision with respect to this issue that impairs their ability to fully appreciate such developments.


This brings me to the matter of what factored into Clinton's defeat on fast track. You would never know from our corporate controlled media but his defeat was, in large measure, a direct consequence of developments at a small Korean-owned auto parts plant in Mexico's infamous Maquiladora Zone.



Specifically, the approximately 100 workers employed at this small auto parts plant outside of Tijuana that produced exclusively for Hyundai began last May and just reached a partially successful conclusion last month. The struggle at this plant was prompted initially by the employer's failure to pay the workers according to the requirements of Mexico's labour laws and by appalling working conditions. It was also focused on getting rid of a government-controlled and pro-employer labour organization and replacing it with an independent union of the workers' choice. The workers' struggle pitted them directly against conditions which only exist because Mexico's government gives corporations a free hand to do as they please by not enforcing its own labour laws and because the provisions of the NAFTA.'s labour side agreement do next to nothing to uphold workers' rights.


Very significantly, these workers waged this protracted struggle with the ongoing support of activists in nearby San Diego who are part of the CJM and with support from labour and social justice activists across North America. Furthermore, their supporters in San Diego took things further by waging a high profile public campaign that got widespread attention in the media and managed to enlist the support of U.S. members of Congress who are critical of NAFTA. As a direct result of this the struggle being waged by these workers became a flashpoint in the debate in the U.S. Congress over fast track legislation designed to facilitate the expansion of NAFTA. Those members of Congress seized on the struggle at this Mexican auto parts plant because they recognized that it constituted definitive proof of the complete failure of the NAFTA side agreement on labour to provide any meaningful protection of the rights of Mexican workers. This provided proof, as if any is needed, of the fact that NAFTA only serves the interests of the transnational corporations; the same transnational corporations that so often flee Canada and the U.S. for Mexico where they mercilessly exploit Mexican workers.

Simply stated, the labour dispute at this auto parts plant had the direct effect of substantially stiffening opposition to Clinton's fast track legislation in the U.S. Congress and this prompted him to indefinitely postpone a vote on it because Clinton knew he would lose. Consequently, the struggle of these workers combined with a protracted campaign of cross border solidarity effectively stopped efforts in the U.S. to expand the jurisdiction of NAFTA dead in their tracks.



Having said this I want to state in no uncertain terms that this critical victory would probably have never been achieved were it not for the efforts of members and supporters of the CJM demonstrating internationalism. They demonstrated internationalism by engaging in cross border solidarity in support of a class-based struggle by workers in Mexico. Indeed, this never would have happened if all of the opponents of free trade had a strategic perspective based on economic nationalism. It is likewise of no small significance that for all its activity and for all the years it has existed the movement against free trade in this country has completely failed to produce a comparable example of success in the fight against free trade. Its record is one of successive failures.

I also wanted to touch on the question of the integral relationship between corporate restructuring, in all its dimensions, (starting with work reorganization on the shop floor up to and including industry-wide restructuring) and the promotion of free trade. However, for the sake of time I will simply say that free trade cannot be properly understood without an in-depth analysis of corporate restructuring and invite questions from the floor regarding this. Thank you.

Bruce Allen

February 26, 1998