Portside

Union says collective agreement is just the start of a broader fight to unionize major employers across the country

Building a different kind of society on the edges of the American empire is an intimidating historical task. It’s understandable why people shy away from it. Yet thinking bigger is the only practical option if we want to escape our present impasse.

“They’re all part of the same industry. It’s not necessarily who is taking jobs from whom, it's the same industry. No one is stealing from anybody. There’s shrinkage on both sides of the border.”

The absence of a socialist left rooted in the working-class is deeply felt in the declining role of the union movement in leading social struggles in Canada as it had for a century.

The auto industry negotiations UAW and Unifor are engaged in are distinct and complex. Ultimately, autoworkers in Canada and the US are fighting for the same things: fairness, job security, and respect after the sacrifices of the last brutal years.

Dependence on profit-dominated private corporations comes with hard-hearted limits and permanent insecurity.

The problem facing autoworkers isn’t simply one or two bad rounds of negotiation, but a race-to-the-bottom pattern of bargaining. At the heart of this mess is the company pitting workers against each other in a competition to save jobs.

The recent split in the Canadian Labour Congress over organizational issues will inhibit the search to renew trade unions. A vision of a powerful, effective, inclusive union movement of the future needs to be developed. If leaders let personal grievances or institutional rivalry dominate the discussion, we will fail, and it may take years to heal the damage.

The move by Unifor comes a day after Canada's largest private sector union split from the CLC.