Editorial
The
CAW-Magna Deal – The Inevitable Final Form of the Liberal-Labour Alliance
Last
week CAW President “Buzz” Hargrove and Magna International Chairman Frank Stronach announced a new arrangement between Magna and the
CAW. The essence of this arrangement is that Magna will allow CAW to unionize
its auto parts plants in return for the CAW accepting the status quo at Magna,
including a permanent ban on strikes and joint union-management selection of
local union representatives.
Under
the new arrangement between the CAW and Magna, the workers will be confined to
complaining about health and safety issues and hoping that management will
listen to their pleas. Everything else will be decided for them by the
CAW-Magna co-management team or, if they cannot agree among themselves, then by
an arbitrator. “Buzz” Hargrove has cynically stated that the right to strike is
a non-issue because the Magna workers do not currently have such a right and
because strikes have become largely meaningless within the current economic
climate. However, Hargrove is not being entirely honest. Prior to the
government recognition of trade unions in the late 1940s workers, unionized or
not, did not have a legal right to strike, but did so anyway with great
frequency. Presumably, the workers at Magna could do so as well. However, once
the CAW “represents” them there will be one more powerful force pressuring them
not to use that tactic. In a nutshell, this arrangement means that the CAW will
join Magma management in jointly controlling the workers and suppressing the
class struggle at Magna’s plants.
Since
the announcement many trade unionists and progressives have denounced the deal
as a sell-out of the interests of the working class and have singled out
Hargrove for his key role in this betrayal. However, Hargrove, as much as he
deserves condemnation, neither engineered this betrayal, nor is he the first or
will he be the last trade union leader to take such a position.
The
formal incorporation of the trade unions into a co-management role is the
inevitable outcome of an arrangement between labour and capital that was forged
in the 1940s and 1950s. The keystone of this arrangement was the agreement
between Tim Buck of the Communist Party of Canada and Liberal Prime Minister
Mackenzie King during the Second World War. Under Buck’s insistence, the CPC
agreed to eliminate the word “communist” from its name and revolution from its
platform and, in exchange, Mackenzie King agreed to legalize the party under
the name Labour Progressive Party. Following the war, the LPP adopted a new
program entitled “The Peaceful and Parliamentary Road to Socialism”, officially
eliminating the main centre of revolution in Canada.
Having
neutralized the communists, Mackenzie King went on to strike a similar deal
with the mainstream trade union movement. In exchange for government
recognition of the trade unions and mandatory collection of union dues (the
Rand formula), the trade unions pledged to become instruments for preserving
class peace. In other words, they agreed to become instruments of capital
against the interests of the working class. Mackenzie King’s labour laws that
formalized this arrangement were, in fact, modelled
closely on those of Benito Mussolini, who established a tri-partite, corporatist
system in Fascist Italy in which the trade unions became an agency of the state
with the mandate of ensuring class peace.
In
order to demonstrate their allegiance to the capitalist system, during the
early 1950s the mainstream trade unions purged their ranks of communists and
other revolutionaries. In 1956 they established the Canadian Labour Congress
(CLC) on the basis of Cold War anti-communism and support for capitalism and
imperialism. From then on the trade union movement in Canada took consistently
reactionary and anti-worker positions and sought to limit the struggle of the
working class to getting a “bigger piece of the pie”.
The
international crisis of capitalism during the 1980s led to the adoption of
neo-liberalism by the international finance capitalists and also led to the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the pseudo-socialist bloc under its control.
The neo-liberal offensive and the collapse of the Soviet Union led, in turn, to
the disruption of the communist and revolutionary movement around the world. In
Canada, every revolutionary centre was, effectively, eliminated. By the
mid-1990s it was clear that the capitalists no longer needed their existing
tri-partite arrangement with the trade unions and began to break these deals
wherever they saw fit. Interestingly, it was Bob Rae’s NDP government in
Ontario which was in the forefront of scrapping the old arrangements. The trade
union movement was thrown into crisis and, in Ontario, responded with the
Ontario Days of Action. The unprecedented outpouring of hundreds of thousands
of workers into the streets and the militancy they expressed shook the trade
union leadership to the core, raising the spectre of
revolution. The tearing up of the post-war Liberal-Labour alliance presented
two stark alternatives. One alternative, expressed by the masses of workers
during the Days of Action, was to abandon the policy class collaboration for
one of class struggle. The other alternative, favoured
by virtually every trade union leader, was to crawl back to the capitalists and
beg for a new class collaborationist role within the new capitalist order, a
new form for the old content of the Liberal-Labour alliance.
Using
their positions of power within the trade union movement, the leaders of the
Ontario Federation of Labour and the leaders of most of the major trade unions
pulled the rug out from under the Days of Action and allowed that movement to
peter out. During the following decade they slowly but surely hammered out a
new arrangement between labour and capital which brings the trade unions even
more in line with the corporatist unions of Fascist Italy, eliminating not only
any talk of class struggle, but going so far as to give up even the day-to-day
economic struggles of the workers. The CAW-Magna deal represents the new face
of the Liberal-Labour alliance in Canada. It demonstrates with stark clarity
the utter bankruptcy of the path charted for the Canadian working class by the
communist and trade union leaders of the 1940s and 1950s.
There
is an alternative to the corporatist trade unionism represented by Hargrove and
other trade union leaders. That alternative – the class struggle of the working
class – is not an option to be adopted or defeated at some trade union
convention. Rather, it is the inevitable result of the division of Canada
between two great classes – the capitalist class and the working class. For
over fifty years the mainstream trade unions have being doing their utmost to
suppress and eliminate the class struggle, but it remains simmering just below
the surface.
While
Hargrove’s deal with Stronach may be viewed as a
betrayal of the working class, in reality it is only the final form for a
betrayal that took place half a century ago and should actually be accepted as
a welcome development. Finally, the Liberal-Labour alliance is being forced to
shed its mask and show its true anti-worker colours.
The trade union leaders are being forced to show workers that they are working
on behalf of the capitalists and their state and not on behalf of the workers.
As the attacks on the workers multiply in the coming years, the existing trade
unions will be exposed as completely as those in the former pseudo-socialist
states were and a new trade union movement will emerge on the basis of waging
class struggle, with the aim of the complete elimination of the capitalist
order. It is inevitable. It is just a matter of time.