Buzz Off

In the true tradition of business unionism Canadian Autoworkers President Buzz Hargrove sold his members out for a bowl of pottage. Despite his pseudo-socialist bluster, which was really ghost written by Sam Gidden, and his so called political activist unionism, in the end like all other union bosses he sold out his workers for a contract today.

It makes one wonder why we need unions. Well actually the bosses need them more than the workers do, since they are used to curtail authentic class struggle, and to mediate on behalf of 'variable labour' with the owners of capital.

The recent record breaking settlement with the Big 3 auto companies was a sell out by Buzz as he prepares to retire.

In the latest round of talks, Mr. Hargrove managed to negotiate what is effectively a wage and benefits freeze.

While denouncing two tiered wage settlements agreed to by UAW and the Big 3 south of the border, Buzz agreed to a made in Canada two tier wage structure no different than those he was denouncing.

Economic provisions of the deals mirror those of the CAW's deal with Ford Motor Co., which was cemented May 4. New hires will be paid 70% of base wages during the first three years of employment before climbing into the full wage scale. The deal cuts a week's vacation in return for 3,500 Canadian dollar (US$3,485) one-time payments and increases to drug co-payments.

The sell out of principles began when Buzz and CAW agreed to a no strike deal with Magna.

The Magna-CAW deal struck last fall between Mr. Stronach and Mr. Hargrove is a good start: In return for a no-strike clause from the union, Magna agreed to stop resisting unionization.

He has now followed it up with a sweet heart deal with the Big 3 selling out autoworkers by tying them into a contract that does not assure them job security, but rather see's further lay offs and plant closures with a payout to the survivors.

The auto industry is bleeding and all Buzz got was a band aid, and he admitted it.

Major economic clauses for all three companies

Wage freeze for three years.

Elimination of cost-of-living adjustment until 2009.

Employee co-payments of 10 per cent on prescription drug costs, amounting to $250 in the first year and growing slightly in the next two years.

Newly hired employees receive 70 per cent of full wages and take three years to get to full level, compared to previous provision of 85 per cent and two-year growth to full wages.

Surrender of 40 hours of holidays a year in return for a one-time payment of $3,500 in 2009.

Chrysler

Etobicoke casting plant in Toronto kept open for 2½ years instead of being closed next year. Company and union will look for buyer or joint venture partner for Chrysler.

Confirmation that next generation of Chrysler's large sedans will be built at Brampton, Ont., plant.

Minivan plant in Windsor, Ont., will maintain three shifts as long as market stays healthy. Shift at St. Louis plant to be cut before any shifts in Windsor.

GM

New rear-wheel-drive car for Oshawa, Ont., to join Chevrolet Camaro.

Extension of Chevrolet Impala production at Oshawa plant to 2012.

New six-speed transmission for St. Catharines, Ont., pending government financial support.

New V8 engine for St. Catharines.

Retirement incentives up to $125,000 and a $35,000 vehicle voucher for workers at Windsor transmission plant, which will be closed in 2010.

Retention of second shift of workers at Oshawa Truck plant. Instead of layoffs, workers will go on two-week rotating shifts until September, 2009.

Ford

Adds new vehicle to Oakville, Ont., assembly plant beyond Ford Flex, which goes into production this year.

Extends life of St. Thomas, Ont., large-car assembly plant by three years from expected closing next year.

Autoworkers in Canada are marking time, as CAW rests on its laurels happy to have organized the Big 3 and now Magna. They have made little effort to take on the Japanese or Korean automakers in Canada who now outsell the Big 3.

Instead of organizing Toyota, Buzz cozied up to Toyota management and backed one of their VP's who was running for Liberal MP last election. Like his bargaining strategies his political strategy of strategic voting leads workers to a dead end.

It's a good thing he is finally retiring unfortunately while that will end the cult of personality in the CAW it will not end the entrenched bureaucracy of labour fakirs and pork choppers who dominate the organization.

CAW likes to claim to be a social union, a left leaning union, but it is in the end regardless of its ideological claims, a business union, structured to maintain capitalism.

As Marx pointed out years ago; Trade unions are not revolutionary organizations, but defense organizations of the working class. They call for a fair days wage instead of demanding the abolition of the wage system.

Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. The fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and with the post War boom they became the hand maiden of capitalism, bargaining with the bosses to get crumbs off the table for their members.

They abandoned any pretense to being agents of social change, instead they became the cops on the shop floor, halting wildcats and job actions by workers. Building permanent corporate style organizations paid for by workers, and populated by professional permanent non-elected paid representatives, they have abandoned the revolutionary aims of workers self-organization; the control of the means of production, the take over and self management of factories by the workers themselves.

Instead they accept the day to day operations of capitalism as inevitable, not worth fighting over except to try and ameliorate its worse excesses, which keeps the bosses happy.

Workers since the beginning of capitalism have organized themselves, when unions were outlawed or banned, workers still created them and used them to strike against the bosses.

This self organization of workers is the dialectic of the conflict between labour and capital. When capitalism boomed it offered unions labour peace, a greater share of the pie, through out the sixties and seventies this was known as the social contract, and was reflected in a trilateral approach to State governance, the unions joined the politicians and capitalists at the table of civil society, determining how the welfare state would function.

Capitalism created the welfare state, in order to avoid a revolution at the end of WWII, and the labour leaders gleefully joined the bosses and their state glad to be accepted as equals. But they never were equals they were bought off, as the eighties and nineties proved when the bosses tore up the social contract and went on the offensive attacking union gains and calling for the privatization of the state.

The unions still slow to wake up, like the door mouse at Alice's Tea Party, thought this assault was an aberration, a few bad apples amongst their friends the bosses.
Instead it was a well planned and orchestrated assault on the State by capitalism which needed more capitals to expand, and saw public sector services as a waste of the that capital.

The class war had been declared when capital started calling for roll backs, give backs, started off shoring and contracting out, and creating two tiered wage structures. The unions gave up fighting back accepting Maggie Thatchers admonition that There Is No Alternative.

And we hear Maggie echoed in Buzz's departing deal with the Big 3.

The 64-year-old Mr. Hargrove described this year's set of talks as the toughest he has faced since he became president in 1992. He warned in an interview yesterday, however, that they will "look like a picnic" compared with what his successor will face in 2011 if Chrysler, Ford and GM continue to lose market share and are forced to continue slashing their Canadian and U.S. operations.

There is a solution to the problem, and it was shown by the Aluminum workers in Quebec, and by workers in Argentina, when capital abandons the factories the workers still make them run.

We can exist with out capitalism, with out hedge fund investments, workers self management of their factories, and of public services is the alternative. Unfortunately it is usually embraced after the fact, after capital has abandoned the factories and communities that surround those factories.

But it shows that workers can organize themselves to run things for themselves and for their communities, without capitalists.

It is the secret of capitalism, that without workers there is no capitalism, we create the beast which oppresses us. Our challenge is not to tame the beast but to end its existence by creating the conditions for real existing socialism.

For more critiques of the CAW deals see:

	Bruce Allen	Learning Some Lessons from Michigan's Auto Jobs Crisis
The evidence of manufacturing job loss on a massive scale in Ontario where the Canadian auto industry is concentrated is clear and undeniable. Nonetheless a question must be asked. Is it accurate to characterize what is taking place here as a “manufacturing crisis?” Or is it something else?

	Sam Gindin	The CAW and Panic Bargaining: Early Opening at the Big Three
In the face of a deteriorating economic climate and concerns about the ‘investment competitiveness’ of Canadian plants, the CAW leadership made a startling move this spring. It had an air of panic about it: the leadership quietly asked the Big Three – GM, Ford and Chrysler – to open their collective agreements early, offering a new ‘pragmatic’ settlement. ...

Sam Gindin	Two-tier Wages, Second-Class Workers
When Autoworker President Buzz Hargrove makes new pronouncements, they carry weight within and beyond the labour movement – even when, as has recently been the case, they seem to undermine what Canadian unions have always stood for...

	Herman Rosenfeld	MAGNA IS NOT CAMI
In Bob White’s October 30th Op-Ed piece in the Toronto Star, the retired CAW president refers to the current Magna deal as a form of "innovation", comparing it to the 1980s fight against concessions and the formation of the new Canadian auto union...
		Sam Gindin	The CAW and Magna: What if Magna Builds an Assembly Plant?
In the discussions of the proposed Magna-CAW (Canadian Auto Workers) ‘Framework of Fairness’ deal, the focus has been on Magna as a components company. But what if Magna opened an assembly plant? Under the language of the ‘Framework of Fairness’, it too would be part of the deal...

SP Labour Committee	Windsor Modules: The CAW-Magna Deal Delivers – Or Does it?
On November 7, 2007, the CAW made an historic announcement. The first collective agreement under the new CAW-Magna Framework of Fairness Agreement (FFA) was ratified at Windsor Modules, a plant of some 250 workers...

SEE:

Alcan Proves Marx Right

Workers Control vs Corporate Welfare

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Can't or Won't

Actually lets be honest here Jim, you won't help, it's not that you can't help.

Ottawa urged to act on auto jobs

Can't help auto sector, Flaherty says of job cuts

After all the conservatives only believe in helping those who help themselves. A hand up not a hand out...unless it's another tax cut for business.


See:

Time For A Made In Canada Auto Industry

Unions=Competitiveness



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Buzz Hargrove,
Liberals, unionization,
CAW, Canada, auto, automobile, Frank Stronach, Magna, business unions, auto parts
Chrysler, CAW, Canada, auto, automobile, Flaherty, Magna, Ontario, environment

How Do You Spell Sell Out?

B U Z Z.

CAW shelves right to strike

In Alberta workers are fighting to change our regressive labour laws to allow the right to strike which was recognized this summer by the Supreme Court. In Ontario workers are being sold out by once progressive talking union leader Buzz Hargrove. All so he can increase his declining membership and assure his pork choppers their salaries. It is sending a chill through out the Canadian labour movement.

Hey maybe Buzz would like to move to Alberta, since the bosses here would love this kind of agreement. In fact thats why CLAC is so popular with employers out here. So what's the difference between CAW and the employee management consultants from CLAC....nothing.

If workers vote in favour of the CAW and the contract at their plant, any subsequent collective bargaining disputes would be resolved through binding arbitration rather than a walkout by the union or a lockout by the company.

The fundamental right to withdraw labour is a provision that unions have protected vigorously for decades as its only ultimate power against management.

But the CAW's decision to give up the right to strike triggered criticism from other labour leaders.

"It's a pretty drastic measure and ultimately is not good for workers because they no longer have the right to withdraw their labour," said Wayne Samuelson, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour.

"It's pretty fundamental to the labour movement and collective bargaining. This is not good, especially if it's exchanged for voluntary recognition of the union. It certainly sets a precedent that working people need to be concerned about."

"Hargrove is creating CAW-employer associations," added Wayne Fraser, Ontario-Atlantic director of the United Steelworkers. "What's to stop other employers, especially Magna competitors, from rightfully asking the CAW for the same no-strike right."

Hargrove said it wouldn't be possible for other auto-parts companies with a union to demand the same provision. However, a non-union employer could get a similar arrangement, he said. "Invite us in."

Hargrove recognizes the need for his business union to adapt to modern business practices, mergers and acquisitions to expand the base of capital (union dues). This began when CAW raided SEIU for its members, claiming it was doing it in the name of democratic social unionism. Which got CAW temporarily removed from the CLC. AUPE in Alberta followed CAW's lead and left the AFL and CLC declaring itself an indepedent union, with support from Buzz.

Neither of these moves were not about democracy or workers rights, since both unions have hired staff and their own management structures. Rather it was about money. In the CAW's case busting a rival union and gaining its members, in AUPE's case retaining affiliation fees they could use themselves.

Now Buzz has gone even further with the potential of 20,000 dues paying workers with a forced dues check off, the Rand Formula, and no right to strike, he will be able to use those funds to balance the books as more attrition hits the auto sector and more of his members retire.

It's a cynical and shallow motive but one that should be expected by business unions that no longer see their purpose as overthrowing capitalism but as getting their members the best deal they can under capitalism.

Once upon a time unions like CAW and others called themselves Social Unions
somehow different from their American International business union counterparts. They were about fighting globalization and neo-liberalism. Buzz has repeatedly claimed he is left wing. Yep the left wing of capitalism.

Today the CAW as I predicted, is all about adapting to globalization and neo-liberalism in order to give Canadian corporations a fighting chance in the world market.

Oct 19, 2007	Sam Gindin	The CAW and Magna: Disorganizing the Working Class
Through the 1980s and 1990s, as the attacks on past working class gains intensified, the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW) was widely recognized – not just in North America but abroad – as standing at the forefront of working class resistance. With the Magna-CAW Agreement signed on October 15, 2007, the CAW now seems at the forefront of working class desperation and defeat...

This is not unlike the recent mergers of the International Transportation and Steel unions and other international unions that are facing declining memberships and lack of bargaining power.

Once again the unions show they are merely an extension of capitalism not an alternative to it.

That alternative exists and it is Revolutionary Syndicalism that was birthed with the IWW over a hundred years ago.

The employing class and the working class have nothing in common."
Preamble to the IWW Constitution

"When the working class unites, there will be a lot of jobless labor leaders."
Eugene Debs, 1905 speech to the IWW Convention

See:

Unions the State and Capital

Global Labour in the Age of Empire

WHITHER SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?
THE CRISIS OF CAPITALISM, LABOUR AND THE NDP
A SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

Will Canadian Labour Accept Free Trade?

Business Unions Sell-out B.C. General Strike

Nationalism Will Not Stop North American Union

This is Class War

CAW To Leave CLC?

Sniveling NDP

Labour Abandons the NDP

Unite the Left

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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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The Peasants Are Revolting!

Gee Thomas, I seem to remember that as the crisis hit the auto industry last fall the Prime Minister not only did not have time, but outright refused, to talk to Buzz Hargrove of the CAW.

But of course Tom, can I call you Tom, goes even further and from his elitist ivory tower, looking down cries out; The Peasants Are Revolting!

The demonstrators are also decrying the secrecy surrounding the meeting and that the only people with access to the three leaders at the summit are 30 chief executives of some of the biggest corporations in the world.

But Thomas D'Aquino, president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, said getting access to political leaders is not the only way to be heard.

"I do not say to myself, 'If I don't get an hour with the prime minister in the next six months, I'm going to go out and protest and reject the system outright,' " he said. "I don't do that because civilized human beings — those who believe in democracy — don't do that."

“The peasants are revolting!”

“They always have been.”

Clearly Tom believes he and his pals represent the ne plus ultra of bourgeois civilization.

Democracy for him is private luncheons and back room meetings between Heads of State and the executive committee of the ruling class.

And for the rest of us it's the same old crumbs from the same old cake.


SEE:

Police Black Bloc

Jelly Bean Summit

Kim Campbell on North American Union

How The MacDonald Commission Changed Canada

Nationalism Will Not Stop North American Union




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Buzz and Stephen

He quotes Buzz, out of context, in the House but will he take his phone call?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure I have anything to add to this subject at the moment, but I would hardly want today to pass without a rare chance for me to quote Buzz Hargrove on the good work that the Minister of the Environment is doing.

Buzz Hargrove said:

I believe [the minister] tried incredibly hard to find balance between the economy, the concern working people have for their jobs and the environmental concerns that concern every Canadian. I think he took a major step forward today that will deal with some of the environmental concerns that will not throw tens of thousands of Canadians out of work.

See Related Article;

Buzz the Protectionist

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Buzz the Protectionist

First he sucked up to the Liberals now he is sucking up to the Conservatives. Despite his 'I am more socialist than you' rants, Buzz Hargrove is simply a good old fashioned protectionist. But now the Tories like his protectionism, whereas they opposed him over Free Trade, and will again as they try an pass a bilateral free trade deal with Korea which he opposes. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Buzz Hargrove agreeing with the Conservatives and the Conservatives agreeing with Buzz Hargrove?

Maybe there is something funny with the environment after all.

But Buzz and the Tories think the only thing that's funny is with the crazy so-called environmentalists' ravenous quest for pushing Global Warming Doom -- all at the cost of the Canadian economy.

"Everybody is chasing this new idol called the environment without any thought of how we got here," the CAW president said yesterday. "I am not buying the argument myself."

But he does believe tens of thousands of jobs will be lost if the movement continues at this pace. "I think people have to recognize this problem is serious," he said.

And it's not global warming he's referring to. It's a Canada and Ontario without an auto industry he's worried about. If Al Gore and David Suzuki get their way, Buzz said, this very well could be the result. "The rhetoric is worrisome," he said. "We have got everything working against us right now."

Unrealistic environmental goals, unfair trade deals and out of control inflation don't add up to good times for automakers --not to mention related industries.

But the Tories, said Buzz, get that. And their plan is a proper response.

"It's realistic. They understand it is going to have to be a long-term solution that will take some time," he said.

He thought Al Gore's comments that the plan the Tories introduced was a "fraud" was out of line.

"I think John Baird is right on the money," said Hargrove. "Al Gore was vice-president for eight years and in the senate before that where they voted against (environmental reforms). So I don't know where he gets his credentials to come in here and lecture."

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