Caterpillar Won Because Nobody Fought Hard Enough

It doesn't have to be this way. We built this country, this economy and this world. We don't have to mourn the loss of more jobs, this time sent to a union-busting "right to work" state, Indiana, for half the wages. It isn't inevitable that our wages, pensions, benefits - or social programs for that matter - are cut. Caterpillar didn't have to happen. It was a choice.

First and foremost it was a choice by Caterpillar. Let's be plain and honest here: Caterpillar bought the Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) plant for one purpose only: to asset strip it. In this case, the most valuable assets were the intellectual property (IP) owned by EMD. IP is big news and big business these days. Apple is suing the makers of Android phones and the makers of Android phones are suing Apple in pretty much every jurisdiction on the planet. Why? IP. Google paid a whopping $12.5 billion to buy Motorola, a failing phone company, last year. Why? To get access to its IP so it wouldn't get sued, most likely by Apple.

Does anyone really believe that Caterpillar wanted anything other than that? Would a company that really wanted to keep a business rolling go into bargaining - only a year after purchasing the company – demanding a 50% wage cut, plus major concessions on pensions and benefits, refuse to budge on those outrageous demands, then lock-out the workers and, finally, shut the plant down permanently just five weeks later? They had the chutzpah to hold a 'job fair' in Indiana the same weekend that they shut down the plant, 36 hours after the governor of Indiana passed so-called "right-to-work" legislation making it harder to unionize in that state. I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch but sometimes people plan to do evil long before they do it - and this was one of those times.

And it's not like it's the only time they have planned and executed evil. Caterpillar – one of the most profitable companies in the USA – brought in $4.9 billion in profit last year on sales of $60.1 billion. That was an 83 percent increase in profits from the year before. How did they make these bales of cash? I'll give you one hint:

On January 27, 2009, Caterpillar laid off 20,000 employees, which is some kind of record. The ostensible reason was to gird for the global recession. But in the short time since, Cat’s revenues have doubled, profits have quadrupled and its stock price has soared by 270 per cent. The recession has provided cover for countless firms squeezing more revenue from fewer and lower-paid workers.

Nor does Caterpillar's despicable behaviour end there. Back in 1991 they shut down a Brampton plant rather than pay decent union wages. A couple of years later they went after workers in Decatur, Illinois squeezing deep concessions after a lengthy battle. Nor is it only in the area of union busting that Caterpillar displays its nastiness. This is, after all, a company that has made huge profits selling bulldozers to the state of Israel that are used to destroy Palestinian houses.

[Caterpillar] supply equipment, like the D9 armoured bulldozer, which is used by the Israeli army to destroy Palestinian homes. The corporation refuses to acknowledge responsibility for the thousands of homes demolished in the West Bank and Gaza using Caterpillar equipment. The price of opposing bullies can be high: in March 2003, U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a Caterpillar bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier, as she attempted to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian family's home.

There can be no doubt that Caterpillar are terrible. But they have been aided and abetted by government at every turn and every level. This too was a choice. They could have fought for these jobs, demanded that Caterpillar not shut the plant down or seized their assets. They didn't and they won't. The Tories base in the resource rich west, which has benefited from the Chinese boom with rapid economic expansion. And the Tories love union busting, free market greed above all else. Insofar as they fight for anything beyond their own enrichment (or free helicopter flights in the case of Peter McKay) it is this.

It will hopefully come back to haunt Stephen Harper that only four years ago, in March 2008, he made a tour of the EMD plant to demonstrate how Tory tax cuts - in this case amounting to a $5 million windfall for Caterpillar – were creating jobs. But if there is a cost it won't be in lost sleep and don't expect any mea culpas from the Tories. Their response was to make the politically correct statement about feeling the pain of all those workers - and then blaming the provincial Liberals. The Liberals blamed the Tories. Whew. Now that we know neither of them are to blame. Nor should anyone be under any illusion that an NDP government would be much different. After all, the plant closure in 1991 in Brampton came under the tenure of the Ontario NDP at the height of its popularity. What did they do? Nada.

Knowing that there will be no help from any of the political parties will be important for workers in the present climate of public and private sector austerity that has seen big battles in recent times. There was last year's battle at Stelco against U.S. Steel and the recent lockout of Rio Tinto Alcan workers in Quebec. Workers at Stelco fought a rearguard battle in Hamilton last year to defend pensions - and will face 200 layoffs in April. The Tories last year forced the postal workers back to work with a worse contract than the one they struck against, then moved to legislate back Air Canada flight attendants, calling their jobs an essential service. This comes on top of big concessions squeezed from auto workers after the 2008 economic meltdown that drove Chrysler and GM into bankruptcy protection. Everywhere, employers are using the crisis - caused by employers - to make workers pay. And governments everywhere are helping them.

My guess is that everyone who is reading this will agree with everything I've said thus far. In fact, my guess is that I'm preaching to the converted. What is more controversial is what can be done. Because even though corporations and government are in synch when it comes to ruining our lives it still isn't inevitable.

In this battle workers only have unions to defend them. But the trouble is, the unions aren't doing very much at all. Certainly, some union locals are waging brave battles - the workers at Stelco braved picket lines for months. But lost have been the traditions that built the industrial unions in the first place - militant tactics, including sit-ins and picket lines that did more than hand out information to those that crossed them. The sort of passivity and reliance on polite bargaining in hotel rooms that has typified the union movement on this continent for so long worked (sometimes) in the 1950s and 1960s when the post-war boom kept the economy expanding and able to provide wage raises and benefits to workers. For a while we were shielded in Canada by our low dollar which made up for higher wages and better work conditions. But the dollar rose and China came on the scene, eliminating those competitive advantages. Suddenly our belief that Canadian unions were more progressive or more militant - which was the justification for the CAW's split from the UAW back in the 1980s - was shown to be a delusion. 

The salad days are gone and, sad to say, somebody forgot to tell the union leadership. Or rather, what they told them was that you can't win and the best that you can do is negotiate how clean is the straight razor that they use to slit your throat. It means that all the fights are given up before they're even begun. That's why the big solidarity rally on January 21 at EMD was moved 5 miles away from the picket line. If you can't win - why get everyone all riled up at the plant gate? What's more important is to appear respectable so that the employer will come back to the table and not give them the excuse to refuse to bargain. And, from the point of view of CAW President Ken Lewenza, the problem is not that EMD shut the plant and laid off the workers - it's that they didn't negotiate the closure with the union.

[Lewenza] said that during bargaining in December, he told the company’s negotiators: “If it’s in your business plan to close us, don’t punish us, let’s work out a closure agreement. They said: ‘We have no intention of closing the facility.’ ”

CAW once prided itself on being, unlike the UAW, the union that doesn't negotiate concessions. Not only did they accept concessions during the 2008 crisis, now here he is saying that they were ready, without a fight to accept the closure of a profitable plant. What this reveals more than anything is that workers have a twofold battle. Not only must they fight the employer, more often than not they must also fight their union leadership who are interested in negotiating "in good faith" not in kicking greedy boss ass. 

But the lesson that ought to be clear by now is that the bosses will keep on taking and taking and taking until they've squeezed every drop of blood from working people. The only thing that they are interested in is profits and until workers start to hit them in their profits - and hard - they will ignore all the niceties: the conciliation reports, the negotiating meetings, the grievances, even the rallies by thousands of supporters that are held miles from the site of the conflict. In Egypt they didn't negotiate the end of the dictatorship - they fought for it. And workers in Egypt's privatized industries haven't won the re-nationalization of their companies by mediated settlement - they went on strike and then won in court...and have had to strike to get the court decisions implemented. In China auto workers won big raises in recent years, not by waiting for employers to grant it to them but by staging a series of wildcat strikes in conditions where independent unions are illegal along with strikes. The lesson we ought to draw from Caterpillar and EMD is this: unless we fight like our lives depended upon it, they will take our lives away from us. That doesn't mean our side will win all the time but at least we'll know that if we lost we gave them everything we had.

Remember When The CAW Was A Militant Union?

Ah, it's nice to reminisce about the good old days sometimes, isn't it? Since we're on the verge of Labour Day Weekend, let's hop into the Way Back Machine for a few, shall we, and review some find old chestnuts from when the Canadian Auto Workers used to fight for workers with the kind of teeth-gritting fierceness that we associate with winning gains and stopping concessions.

Of course, we could go back to 1945 when a militant strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW), forged in the militant sit-down strikes of the 1930s, won recognition at Ford in Oshawa and helped lay the foundation of the modern Canadian industrial union movement by winning automatic dues deductions and the closed shop in what has become known as The Rand Formula, after the mediating judge, Justice Ivan Rand. It also won medical benefits for the Ford workers.

Fast forward to 1984 and the negotiations between GM and the United Auto Workers. From the point of view of Bob White, president of the Canadian region of the UAW, along with his assistance Buzz Hargrove and Bob Nickerson, the parent UAW was giving away the farm in concessions. As well, the UAW, under the leadership of Owen Bieber, were lobbying the US Congress to bring auto production back to the USA from Canada. This was the tail end of the Reagan Recession of the early 80s. Chrysler was about to go belly up ("the more things change, the more they stay the same...") and Canadian auto production - guaranteed under the terms of the Auto Pact - was able to undercut American production because of the low value of the US dollar and the fact that Canada has socialized medicine. The lower cost of production and Canadian workers also meant that there was less pressure on GM and the other Big Three to squeeze concessions out of Canadian workers. With Bieber refusing to take the differential situation in Canada seriously - and putting Canadian members' jobs at risk by campaigning against them - Bob White led the Canadian region out of the UAW. The CAW was born. And while the logic of the split was never as much about militancy as the CAW hagiographies would have it, it did lead to a popular slogan "no concessions" to define how the CAW was supposedly different than the UAW.

Buzz Hargrove took over from Bob White in 1992 and was president of the CAW until 2008. During the 1990s the CAW continued it's "no concessions" stand at a time when many other unions were facing rollbacks, particularly in the public sector. Perhaps it was this apparent militancy that made the CAW a natural ally of those public sector unions who felt betrayed by the Ontario NDP government of Bob Rae and, then, with the election of Mike Harris' Tories, spearheaded the Days of Action movement. Though, when push came to shove, the CAW and the public sector unions didn't break with the conservative Pink Paper unions to call a province-wide general strike. They allowed the right wing leadership to veto the movement and were thereby complicit in the defeat.

If anything this defeat strengthened the impression of the CAW as a militant union, along with Hargrove's tough talk and self-identification as a socialist. The existence of the CAW flying squads - groups of activists that would show up to support the picket lines of other unions or to anti-poverty struggles added to this perception - as did the CAW's support for extra-parliamentary activist groups like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Even the CAW's support for raids on other unions in the private sector, notably the SEIU (a Pink Paper union), was justified by the CAW's supposedly greater militancy, expansive democracy and no concessions strategy. However, ultimately, the flying squads were wound up and the CAW's expulsion from the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress (which groups all the unions at the provincial and federal level) didn't lead to the foundation of a new, "radical" labour central as they predicted. And after a semi-riot at an OCAP rally at Queens Park, the CAW pulled funding from OCAP. Finally, the CAW under Hargrove used their left wing rhetoric to justify a right wing move - endorsing Liberal candidates in the Ontario provincial election. This led to their expulsion from the NDP. Of course, ultimately, this gallop rightwards under the influence of a set of politics that sees no real role for the rank and file, only the brilliance of great leaders, led to the CAW accepting concessions contracts in negotiations with the Big Three during the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed it. The differential advantage of a cheap dollar was now over and the Auto Pact was gone. The only way to defend past gains or win news ones is to fight and, "no concessions" rhetoric aside, the CAW hasn't actually done much fighting in recent years.

All of this brings us back to the present day and CAW president Ken Lewenza's call for a Liberal/NDP merger. They are now attempting to validate their move to the right by bringing along the entire labour movement into an unholy alliance with the other party of big business, the Liberals. It is like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And it is utterly stupid, tactically speaking, for the NDP to seek to dissolve itself just at the moment when it is on the rise and has the potential to eclipse the Liberals on the basis of winning their supporters to an open party of the Labour movement. And it would be an absolute disaster to surrender the hard fought existence of an independent party of the labour movement - for all its warts and weaknesses. One look at the state of working class politics in the United States should make that obvious enough. One of the few countries in the developed world that doesn't have a labour party, the United States also has seen the biggest retreats in workers' rights and levels of unionization in the developed world. The United States has the biggest economy on the planet and has the largest gap between the richest and the poorest on the planet - a gap that has grown exponentially since the 1970s. Even under the supposedly "union friendly" Democrats, workers' rights have not advanced, handouts have gone to the banks that caused the crisis and tax breaks for the rich have been continued. Do we really want to replicate that model? Do we really want another party like the Democrats in which the labour movement is the junior partner whose fundamental role is to get out the vote for representatives of the wealthy and then to shut up while the people they got elected screw them over?

It is indeed a sad and sorry day to see the depths to which the once mighty Auto Workers have fallen. It speaks to the desperate need to renew the House of Labour.

CAW chief Lewenza urges NDP to consider merger with Liberals - The Globe and Mail

Support The Strikes To Defend Pensions

Usually even the mention of Margaret Wente's name can ruin my day but her article in today's Globe & Mail is actually not too bad in terms of laying out the terms of the strike and lock-out at Canada Post and Air Canada respectively. Of course, in the interests of "balance" she reaches the basic conclusion that while pensions were great while they lasted, they're unsustainable. My guess is that she won't be giving up her pension in order to save the Globe & Mail's bottom line but that's another story.

What is most important here is that corporate Canada and the government are opening up a new austerity front that is about reducing our living standards - both in the present and in the future - as a means to restore the economy to profitability. In the public sector the Tories intend to slash spending and reduce payrolls both through layoffs and attrition over the coming months, beginning with the soon-to-be-released budget. In the private sector, pensions are the big target.

Make no doubt about it, pensions are a component of wages, just like healthcare benefits. When Canada Post and Air Canada attack the pension plans of their employees, they are demanding wage reductions. But workers have the right to ask a number of questions when they're told to take the knife. The most obvious one that is printed in big letters on the picket signs of Air Canada employees is why should only CEOs get pensions and not workers? This must seem doubly infuriating to Air Canada employees who took it on the chin a few years back to "save Air Canada", agreeing concessions in a big way. Now, Air Canada is profitable again - and is coming back for more.

But there is a deeper question that has to do with the whole way the economy runs. Workers didn't cause the economic crisis of 2008 - the Great Recession. That was sparked by greedy and corrupt banks with their exotic and incomprehensible debt packaging schemes that came unraveled - and in the US housing market shows no signs of stopping the decline. Nor are workers responsible for the long term decline in western economies that have come more and more to rely upon "financialization" - that is, to have greater weight placed upon the casino of speculative investment - while China has become the world's manufacturer. These imbalances and contradictions are directly the result of the policies of neo-liberal government - from the Harper Tories to the Chretien Liberals and, beyond our borders, to every party across the spectrum from Labour to Republican and Democrat. They are also the result of decisions in innumerable boardrooms where investors, bankers and manufacturers have shifted resources and capital around the world in order to maximize profits.

The result of all this jerry-rigged global profit-taking has been that workers didn't benefit particularly during the boom times - with debt levels rising even in the peak periods of growth in the past three decades - while the global economy has become more dangerously unbalanced. Now, with it likely that the imbalance will lead to years of stagnation, workers are again expected to pay, this time with their future as well as their present wages.

And it's not just in Canada that this battle is taking place. Attacks on pensions are a central feature of the struggles and strike waves in Greece. There is also a massive public sector strike set to take place in the UK on June 30 that will involve teachers, civil servants, and more. This struggle is about whether we will continue to live in a world where the rich get richer in good times and bad and the working class gets driven ever downward towards immiseration.

That's also why what is needed is a united fight, not just piecemeal isolated actions. The Tories will legislate the Air Canada workers back to work by early next week - effectively eliminating the right to strike for a small group of non-essential workers (they're customer service agents and call centre staff, for God's sake!). This will be followed by similar legislation against postal workers in the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. There are two other unions at Air Canada, as well as the Pilots Association. They all oppose Air Canada's pension plans. They should all be out together - if the customer service agents are defeated, they almost certainly will have lost as well. In fact, union leaderships must see the writing on the wall as far as pensions go. The entire working class will either be picked off one by one, sector by sector, or they will come together in a joint campaign, which will probably need to include industrial action, to win. It's all of our future's that's at stake.

The unions at Canada Post and Air Canada are fighting a rearguard action - The Globe and Mail