Perhaps no other event in the history of the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) has evoked more of a reaction than the spectacle in December of CAW National President Buzz Hargrove gleefully giving then Prime Minister Paul Martin a CAW jacket to wear while Martin was campaigning for re-election. New Democratic Party (NDP) members and supporters were infuriated. The Liberals were ecstatic. The Left outside of the NDP cringed seeing vindication of their worst opinions of Hargrove and his political history going back to the days of Dennis McDermott’s bitter fights against the left in the Canadian UAW. Disgust was widespread.

But “jacketgate” is really misunderstood. It is misunderstood because it did not actually mark a sudden or dramatic shift in the political and class orientation of the CAW. The CAW’s right turn exemplified by that spectacle has actually been evident for almost a decade. It has been taking shape since shortly after the Ontario Days of Action were deliberately wound down by a union bureaucracy in Ontario in which the right-wing “pink paper unions” (USWA, UFCW, SEIU, OPSEU etc.) achieved hegemony in the Ontario Federation of Labour and hegemony in determining the political orientation of the province’s labour movement.

Ontario 1999

The demise of the extra-parliamentary social movement that was mobilized during the Ontario Days of Action went hand in hand with a deliberate and general retreat by organized labour in Ontario, where the CAW’s membership is concentrated, into electoral politics. Initially this led to some political disarray then to a focus on the 1999 Ontario election. Defeating the province’s Tory government at the polls became the sole objective of Ontario labour.

While there was unity with regard to the objective there was not over the electoral strategy for achieving it. Essentially two distinct strategies were pursued. One focused on exclusively supporting the NDP. The other focused on strategically voting for those candidates most likely to defeat a Tory meaning, in most cases, a Liberal. The CAW broke new ground at this point and made a decisive political turn to the right by embracing the latter strategy. This marked a sea change for the CAW. The union had been a bulwark of support for the NDP since the party’s formation in 1961.

This notwithstanding, in 1995, the CAW leadership had punished the Ontario NDP for the its government’s anti-worker Social Contract legislation while steadfastly continuing to support the NDP in the rest of English Canada. The CAW did this by adopting a policy in the 1995 Ontario provincial election of only supporting NDP candidates who defied the NDP government of Premier Bob Rae by openly opposing the anti-labour Social Contract legislation. This effectively meant the CAW adopted a political position decisively to the left of both the NDP and every other predominantly private sector union. This political orientation to the left of the NDP remained clearly in force for the next couple of years while the Days of Action were taking place in opposition to the Tories’ policies.

Nonetheless, the planned demise of the Ontario Days of Action and the collapse of the movement associated with it largely facilitated the CAW’s subsequent right turn. As indicated it set the stage for the abandonment by the CAW of its tradition of unwavering support of the NDP in favour of strategic voting. Many CAW activists and local CAW leaders opposed this right turn wanting to remain loyal to the NDP. Others on far left prophetically opposed it seeing it as a clear opening to the Liberals and as an effective abandonment of class politics in the CAW’s political orientation.

Significantly, the unfolding of these developments went hand in hand with an extensive survey of the CAW rank and file concerning the union’s involvement in politics and intended to revise the political course of the union. The leadership analyzed the results of the survey and concluded the CAW would be more effective politically if it focused its political work on key issues rather than just on building support for the NDP. A new “non-partisan” political course could now be justified and was then set. This new political course proved to be wholly compatible with and conducive to strategic voting becoming an entrenched CAW policy.

Beyond this the collapse of the social movement embodied in the Ontario Days of Action set the stage for much more than just an embrace of strategic voting and a measured degree of electoral support for the Liberal Party. It simultaneously led to a significant change in the way the CAW addressed issues that was also complementary to the embrace of strategic voting with similar political effects. Specifically, extra-parliamentary political action ceased to be a central feature of the CAW’s mobilization around political issues and with this the CAW’s advocacy of what it claims is “social movement unionism” started to ring increasingly hollow. Accordingly, more and more effort was channeled into lobbying politicians and timid postcard and letter writing campaigns. It was as if the CAW had disavowed militant mass protest and the politics of the street.

Quebec City 2001

Indeed, the final gasp of the CAW’s commitment to the latter was vividly on display in Quebec City in April 2001 during the Free Trade of the Americas Summit. That was when organized labour effectively and shamelessly turned its back on the youth who constituted the vanguard of the then thriving movement against capitalist globalization and who personify the future of the left. During the two days of mass confrontation in Quebec City between these inspiring youth and their genuine allies, including some CAW activists and local leaders, on one side and the riot police on the other the few prominent CAW members present largely stayed clear of the main events. They took part in the organized labour’s hapless march to an empty parking lot on the outskirts of Quebec City instead.

Meanwhile, and most significantly, the large majority of the CAW leadership met at CAW Council on the same weekend far away in Port Elgin, Ontario. This happened because top CAW leaders had refused to move the meeting to Montreal in order to facilitate maximum participation in the mobilizations in Quebec City. In retrospect what happened that weekend in April 2001 was a very telling indication of how much things had changed in the CAW in the wake of the demise of the Ontario Days of Action and how much they stood in contrast to electrifying events like the occupation of the Oshawa Fabrication Plant during the 1996 CAW strike against GM and a one day general strike in Toronto right afterwards.

What happened in April 2001 starkly revealed how much of a gap there now was between the CAW’s occasionally militant rhetoric and practical reality when it came to the changing political orientation of the union. The chilling political fallout from 9/11 subsequently accentuated this marked shift away from militancy.

Logically the new emphasis on political tactics like lobbying coupled with the embrace of strategic voting combined to give additional momentum to realizing a closer relationship with Liberal politicians particularly insofar as the Liberal Party is traditionally the party of government and insofar as today’s Tories barely give unions like the CAW the time of day. Lines of communication between the Liberals consequently strengthened and, especially under Paul Martin’s federal government and Ontario’s Liberal government, bridges were being built to the obvious pleasure of the Liberals ever mindful of any opportunity to undercut labour support of the NDP. This, in large measure, set the stage for “jacketgate”.

But another critically important dynamic was at work with a very similar trajectory. Namely, the development of the auto and auto parts industry in Ontario within the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the broader phenomenon of capitalist globalization prompted a significant shift in the relationship of the union to the auto corporations it collectively bargains with. Developments over the past decade and a half within these industries in this context have caused the CAW to experience a continuous downsizing of its workforce in them and especially at “Big 3” operations in Canada. Worse still, this continual downsizing of the CAW’s auto and auto parts workforce has occurred at the same time as non-union auto manufacturing operations at Toyota and Honda have underwent a major expansion. This expansion has been prompted mainly by increased sales by these corporations and growing market share. This is resulting in the very ominous growth of a non-union workforce in the Canadian auto industry that directly threatens the future of pattern or industry-wide CAW agreements.

Oshawa 2006

These developments have resulted in fierce competition for a diminishing number of jobs at GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler prompting those corporations to step up their pressure for both contract concessions by the CAW and massive government subsidies with the blessing of a CAW desperate to stop the relentless job losses. Confronted with this increasingly dire situation the CAW has become less and less adversarial in its relationship to these employers and more and more willing to accommodate their demands for more flexible collective agreements seemingly oblivious to the harsh impact of doing so on rank and file CAW members. They are the ones who have to work under these flexible agreements and they are the ones will experience daily the effects of the relentless restructuring of operations and the speed up that flexible agreements are designed to facilitate (ie. the just negotiated Oshawa “shelf agreement”).

The end result is yet another development that logically goes hand in hand with developing a closer relationship to the Liberals who, as noted, are usually best positioned to deliver the government subsidies to these corporations in exchange for new investments that are also consistently tied to the acceptance of local contract concessions giving the corporations more flexibility in managing their workplaces and facilitating corresponding reductions in production costs at our members’ expense. In effect, consent to a realignment of the work process on the shop floor has coincided and still is coinciding with a realignment of the CAW’s political orientation making for an broad realignment of the union’s class orientation.

In contrast to the Liberals, the NDP is largely left out in the cold. Being out of power the NDP cannot deliver government subsidies and can only be very useful to the CAW in the auto and auto parts industries if and when it holds the balance of power while a minority Liberal government is in office.

The CAW’s subsequent break from the NDP cannot be accurately and thoroughly understood without grasping these things. Indeed, the context they define also goes a long way towards explaining the CAW leadership’s recent fury at the NDP over the federal party’s decision late last year to not continue to prop up Paul Martin’s federal Liberal government in order to extract legislation the CAW desired. This context also largely explains the depth of their current, deepened disillusionment with the NDP and it illustrates why the CAW is so supportive of changing to a parliamentary system based upon proportional representation federally and provincially.

On the other hand this context does not explain why the CAW has never made a serious, let alone sustained, effort to mobilize within the NDP in order to push it to the left and make it take up organized labour’s goals in a more meaningful way. Nor does this context explain why the CAW and the Canadian UAW before it has more often than not either openly aligned itself or passively gone along with the NDP establishment sometimes even in direct opposition to the left within the NDP.

The Party’s Over

These things beg the question of what can be done in the wake of the CAW’s pre-determined decision at a CAW Council meeting in April to terminate its relationship to the NDP and opt for a redoubling of its less than consistent support for its social movement partners as an ostensibly viable political alternative. Demanding an unlikely but not inconceivable return to the previous status quo in terms of a restored relationship with the NDP would be a political dead end. There is no reason at all to believe a restored relationship would be followed by a determined CAW effort to internally challenge both the NDP leadership and the increasingly right-wing drift of the NDP. The effective absence of any such effort throughout all the years the CAW was in the NDP precludes any credible hope that this would be attempted unless the current top leadership of the CAW is thoroughly swept from power and its army of full time officers suddenly embrace anti-capitalist politics in a truly meaningful, as opposed to a rhetorical and momentary, way. Regardless, the rightward drift of social democratic parties globally in the context of 21st Century capitalism reveals such an attempt to turn the NDP decisively to the left would be doomed to failure.

Working towards the formation of a political alternative decisively to the left of the NDP is a more plausible option. But it has little support currently within the CAW. In the absence of much more support this must be considered a distant goal. Nonetheless, ongoing advocacy of a political alternative decisively to the left of the NDP is still critically necessary in order to methodically build support for its eventual formation.

In the meantime there is a compelling need for an immediate political strategy which combines sustained attacks on continued CAW electoral support for the Liberals and strategic voting with relentless demands that the CAW leadership return to an adversarial and meaningful anti-concessions stance towards employers fully cognizant of how succumbing to corporate demands for flexibility is ultimately suicidal for a workers’ organization. Finally, the CAW leadership must also be relentlessly pressed to effectively practice what they are now preaching in relation to our social partners. They must be compelled to forge a renewed, sustained and consistent commitment to militant, extra-parliamentary political action of the kind we saw during the Ontario Days of Action the demise of which largely set the stage for the current, muddled political mess highlighted in December by “Jacketgate”.

Bruce Allen is the Vice-President of CAW Local 199 in St. Catharines, Ontario. He founded the CAW Left Caucus.