Ever since the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the cycle of “Big Three” auto bargaining has been a major economic and political event, an indicator of the progress of the class struggle in North America. If such interest has sagged of late, it charged back into the news with the aggressive declaration of Unifor’s president, Jerry Dias, that winning new investments for Canada is at the top of the union’s agenda in its current bargaining round with General Motors (GM), Ford, and Chrysler. Dias followed up this challenge to management’s right to unilaterally decide investments with the audacious warning that if these US-based corporations don’t deliver on bringing a fair share of investments to Canada, they can expect a strike.

This has set up a confrontation with GM in particular, which has adamantly stated that it won’t negotiate over where to put its profits. Its investment decisions, it asserted, will be made by GM alone and only after the contract has been put to bed — effectively saying, with GM’s typical amalgam of arrogance and paternalism, that it will decide once the workers have shown they will behave.

A remarkable aspect of these incompatible stances between GM and Unifor is that both the company and the union are taking different positions than they have in the past. The truth is that when it suited GM, it regularly brought its investment decisions to the table. In every bargaining round in the United States since the end of the 1970s, GM used the threat of withholding investment and the promise of bringing new investments to get wage restraint or, more often, concessions from the United Auto Workers (UAW).