The CAW-Magna deal is truly creepy
Up until this point I was trying not to get too upset by the deal that CAW cut with Magna. Maybe I just don’t get it, maybe there are forces there at work beyond my understanding. Maybe I just have no appreciation for the stress the auto industry – and consequently CAW – is under. But Ed Broadbent’s opinion piece in the Globe and Mail has pushed me over the edge.
Up ’til now, all comment on the deal – both positive and negative – has focused on the fact that CAW signed away the right to strike. “Big deal,” some would say. There are lots of unions – in both the private and public sector – that sign away the right to strike. Some have it legislated away.
It’s a cruel twist of something that CAW is now becoming one of the unions they used to denounce, but hey, that’s capitalism in the era of free capital and no-fly lists for you. Not much that can be said without sounding smug.
Those who care about these things – and I’m counting myself among them – were a touch concerned about the fact that CAW had signed away the right to strike before the union was even in place. More to the point, before the Magna workers themselves had had a chance to decide for themselves if they wanted the right to strike.
But these to me are minor concerns compared to what I read today in Ed Broadbent’s piece, to wit:
What the bloody hell?
Don’t get me wrong – I’m no Polyanna about shop stewards. They can be fabulous, fearless, tireless advocates for their members. They can also be more like cops than the cops, they can be self-serving, manipulative and unprincipled.
But whatever they are, that’s the union’s business. In the back pocket of the boss? Vote ‘em out. Too doctrinaire to see a good deal staring ‘em in the face? Vote ‘em out.
That’s how it’s got to be if the system even has a hope of working for the workers. Imagine if you were on trial for something and the prosecution got to veto your choice of lawyer. You’d get all frothy and start hollering that you’d been drugged in the night and flown to Myannmar or something.
But that’s exactly the sort of system the CAW has agreed to in order to get voluntary recognition at Magna.
Bob White – who’s in The Star today defending the CAW-Magna deal – doesn’t actually mention the whole employer-union jointly-approved advocates thing.
He hangs his defence of the agreement not on the facts of the deal – except to say things are so tight in manufacturing that the right to strike is meaningless anyway – but on the assertion that CAW has always tried new things in the workplace. (Like Ingersoll’s CAMI plant, whose local leadership, by the way, hates the deal.)
That might be true. It’s nice to try new things. Clothes, food, TV shows. But clothes you take back. TV – you change the channel. We can’t change the channel at Magna, can we. Not the rest of the unions in this country, nor most importantly, the workers at Magna who may, at some point, realize that their union had a really stupid idea.
