Unions=Competitiveness

Yep I know it appears counterintuitive but it' s true. Labour and Capital go together like a horse and carriage. Labour produces capital and so a merger like this is the very anti-thesis of the term One Big Union.

In order to be competitive Mr. Anti-Union has made a satanic pact with Mr. Union.

In this case its the grandest merger of them all, between Frank Stronach's Magna and Buzz Hargrove's CAW.

In the global economy corporations and unions are swept up by merger and acquisitions mania. However usually it was corporate mergers or union mergers, now we have a union-corporate merger in order to compete in the global market.

After all that is why they are called 'business' unions. They sell workers labour to the boss.

Auto parts entrepreneur Frank Stronach and Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove have signed a deal allowing the union to organize at Magna International, citing the need to work together in non-traditional ways.

Hargrove said that the two sides have been working for years on developing non -adversarial relationship to help deal with challenges from offshore manufacturers.

Stronach, who founded the company and grew it into Canada's largest auto parts manufacturer, says society needs "checks and balances" and unions help balance the profit motives of companies.

Buzz has now really joined the Liberal family. Literally. After all they both hate Harper.

Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove says he's at least partly to blame for it taking so long to unionize the workers at Magna International . "It's probably more my fault than it is Frank Stronach's," Hargrove said today at a signing ceremony with Stronach, Magna's founder, at the auto parts manufacturer's headquarters in Aurora, Ont.

Frank Stronach, the founder and chairman of the auto parts maker Magna International, urged his 18,000 hourly employees in Canada on Monday to join the Canadian Auto Workers.

Mr. Stronach’s endorsement followed two years of talks that concluded Monday with a formal agreement on how the union would organize the company’s employees. Under its terms, the C.A.W., Canada’s most prominent union, agreed that Magna’s workers would not strike and the company, in turn, waived its right to lock out employees.

The unusual agreement developed from an unsolicited approach Mr. Stronach made to the union’s president, Basil E. Hargrove, in October 2005.

At the expense of the workers he represents.

Magna's union deal: no strikes

Gee that's what Sam Gompers father of business unionism said too;

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit

The more thoroughly the workers are organized and federated the better they are prepared to enter into a contest, and the more surely will conflicts be averted. Paradoxical as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that militant trade unionism is essential to industrial peace.

What we have endeavored to secure in industrial relations is industrial peace.

Hey Buzz whatever happened to; "workers control of the means of production?"

Guess Sam Gindin will have to quit ghost writing his socialist articles in the Monthly Review.

Magna, union in `template' pact
CAW secures representation at auto-parts giant in return for suspending workers' right to strike

Magna International Inc. and the Canadian Auto Workers have reached an unprecedented deal that will make union organizing easier at the company's plants here but eliminate the right to strike for several years.

Under the deal, the Aurora-based auto-parts powerhouse will allow workers to decide on union representation at each plant by voting on tentative contracts, instead of experiencing the divisiveness of organizing drives and lingering acrimony.

The deal follows an initiative by Magna chair Frank Stronach more than 1 1/2 years ago to develop a "Framework for Fairness" so the company could improve productivity, innovation and labour relations in North America amid growing competition offshore.

It will give the CAW a major opportunity to gain thousands more members in a sector where its traditional membership and clout have plunged over the past two decades, at slumping General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Magna operates 61 manufacturing plants with 20,700 workers in Canada, mostly in southern Ontario.

The union currently represents only about 1,000 workers at three Magna plants.

One reason the CAW never broke into Magna, despite numerous attempts, is that employees were happy with Magna's deferred profit-sharing plan, recreation areas, and daycare facilities, Mr. Lilley said.

For more than a year however, Mr. Stronach has been talking about letting both the Canadian Auto Workers and the United Auto Workers unions in as a way to put aside old management-labour divisions in the North American auto industry and ensure its survival. The hope is that the newfound co-operation could foster a new work model -- and keep auto parts and automaking jobs that might otherwise move to other continents. As Dan Luria, an analyst at the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center put it, Mr. Stronach "wants to be able to say he remade labour relations in North America."

Unions such as the CAW have become more pragmatic by promoting productivity and other business goals at the same time Magna has warmed up to organized labour, one analyst said yesterday.

It's the final nail in the coffin of the labour movements failed anti-NAFTA campaign.

This merger between the CAW and Magna gives new meaning to North American Union and deep integration.

In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists. If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.
Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy

See:

Unions the State and Capital

Chrysler Made In Canada?

Buzz the Protectionist

Steel Merger

Union M&A

Mittal Plays Monopoly

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