News and views from SA Canada Auto Workers pact with Big 3 deals major setback to labour
2012Bruce Allen 2012-10Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 8 →
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Vice president of CAW Local 199, and V.P. Niagara Re gional Labour Council (writing in a personal capacity)
Three years ago, General Motors and Chrysler workers made massive contract concessions. In fact, GM workers experienced two rounds of concessions bargaining in less than a year, the Harper government enforcing even greater rollbacks than GM said it needed. Following that enormous historic defeat, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) leadership loudly but unconvincingly assured their members that we would fight again another day.
Three years later, “another day” has come and gone, without a fight and with more concessions at GM, Ford, and Chrysler. The latest concessions are unprecedented, particularly with respect to new hires.
The CAW long denounced the two-tier wage agree unchanged for many years to come—plus it will take a full six years just to reach 70 per cent of the full rate.
Worse, new hires will see deductions from their wages go towards the cost of their pensions, which will be seri ously inferior to those available to current employees, while current employees experience no wage deduc tions that go towards their pensions. In effect, the CAW has accepted a blatant system of two-tier pensions. New hires will also get much less vacation time.
All of this will result in a windfall of additional prof its for the Detroit Three auto corporations’ Canadian operations, and it will accelerate the general decline of living standards for industrial workers in Canada. The time when autoworkers led the way in raising the liv ing standards for industrial workers in Canada are long gone. Now they are leading the way downwards. And the CAW is functioning like a conduit for capital’s on slaught against labour.
Current active employees at the Detroit Three in Can ada will share in the pain of these long-term collective agreements—in force until 2016. There are no wage increases at all. There will be only one cost of living in crease—in the last quarter. Built-in COLA is replaced by lump-sum payments, cynically timed to be paid just before Christmas, when autoworkers used to get a sea sonal bonus.
Simply stated, this means autoworkers will experience a steady decline in real income over the next four years. So will retired autoworkers. They have already been stripped of COLA on their pensions and they suffer a very inferior two-tier benefit package, which is steadily eroding.
None of this has been justified by declarations that new product investment has been acquired. There are no new products to be built in Canadian auto plants. Now the sorry, but all too familiar refrain is that we are living in tough times, faced with policies from hostile governments, including a high dollar. These excuses simply signal that there is no reason to expect anything but more of the same, even with the approaching CAWCEP merger, and with very serious consequences for labour as a whole, particularly in terms of living stan dards. No one is now proclaiming we will “fight again another day.”
A very bleak future lies ahead, unless we see the emer gence of a rank and file-based opposition to the current leadership—a class-conscious movement that recogniz es that calling a halt to the ongoing retreat is imperative to keep us from going from very bad to even worse. n (Left) The Oct. 6 antiwar march in Toronto was one of many worldwide events marking the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Photo: Walid Sabihuddin