From Confrontation to Partnership, the NDP to “Strategic Voting”

The primary focus of Shifting Gears is the relation of the autoworkers’ union to politics. There is discussion of contract negotiations, but this is not a book about the factory floor. The action largely unfolds at union headquarters, in government offices, and at the bargaining table.

In analyzing the union’s transformation over time, Ross and Savage focus on two aspects: 1) a shift at the bargaining table from confrontation to partnership with management; and 2) a shift in the electoral realm from viewing the NDP as the political arm of labor to its current Gompersist policy of “strategic voting.”

Their analysis is based on an impressive amount of research, digging through the union’s archives, executive board minutes, and secondary literature. But the empirical core of the book consists of a large number of in-depth interviews with many of the key figures in the union’s past and present, including almost all living CAW and Unifor presidents (with one exception), as well as several political insiders, mainly from the NDP.

The book proceeds chronologically, with an initial chapter surveying the formative years of the UAW in Canada, starting with the pivotal 1937 Oshawa GM strike, the internal union fights between Communists and social democrats, the Canadian UAW’s support for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and its central role in the creation of the NDP in 1961. It then traces the Canadian UAW’s role as a pillar of the NDP establishment, especially when it came to crushing the socialist Waffle in 1972 (a radical wing of the NDP that tried to lead the party in a more explicitly leftist direction), and the increasingly strained relationship with its US parent union, leading to the fateful split in 1985 that created the CAW, as recounted in the fantastic documentary Final Offer.

That split was over the US union’s turn toward concessions bargaining and labor-management partnership. The CAW sought to maintain a more militant, confrontational model of unionism, paired with a broader social vision for labor. It was a model that was built into the DNA of the union.

We then move to the 1980s and 1990s, where the CAW sought to fight against corporate free trade deals, and also ended up fighting the NDP, particularly when the party won provincial power in Ontario with the Bob Rae government. The competing interests of party and union strained the relationship between the two, creating cracks in the labor-NDP alliance.

With the Mike Harris Conservatives’ “Common Sense Revolution” booting the NDP from power in Ontario in 1995, the CAW shifted toward a militant syndicalism, embodied most clearly in the “Days of Action” strikes that swept the province in the years following Harris’s election. Here, the CAW positioned itself firmly as a left pole of attraction within labor, making alliances with broader social movements and opposing the social democratic electoralism of the “pink paper” unions like the Steelworkers, who continued to pin their hopes on electing more NDP legislators.

At the same time, this militant syndicalism opened the door toward what ended up becoming the CAW’s, then Unifor’s more opportunistic, Gompersian approach to politics. With the CAW-NDP relation strained, the union adopted more of a “block the Conservatives” approach to elections.

Starting in the late 1990s, this became the union’s “strategic voting” approach, where the CAW sought to endorse the candidate they deemed most capable of defeating the Conservative candidate in a given election. That choice often was not the NDP candidate — an approach that did not ingratiate the union with NDP electeds and activists. The two grew further apart. By 2006, CAW president Buzz Hargrove was expelled from the NDP for, among other sins, draping Liberal prime minister Paul Martin in a CAW jacket, and the CAW National Executive Board voted to disaffiliate from the NDP.

As Ross and Savage astutely note, the union turned right by talking left in this period. They framed their move away from the NDP as a response to the party abandoning its pro-labor, progressive vision and turning to the Right. But the practical response to moving away from the NDP was to cozy up to the Liberals.

Meanwhile, shifts in the auto sector including mass layoffs and plant closures put the CAW on the defensive. In response, the union turned to the very tactics that led them to split from the UAW: concessions and partnership.

By 2013, the union was fully committed to strategic voting in politics and a more collaborative approach to bargaining, with the whole package still wrapped in a veneer of progressive social unionism. But it was losing members, and as a survival strategy turned to a merger with the CEP to create Unifor.

The union leadership did not portray the merger as a survival maneuver or even as a merger. Rather, they framed it as the creation of an entirely new union, based on a new model of general unionism that moved beyond their roots in auto. It did include some innovations like community union chapters, but these amounted to little.

In practice, the union’s focus on protecting jobs by offering concessions to management and seeking deals with whichever politicians were willing to bargain with them led to chilly relations with the NDP, transactional relations with the Liberals and even Conservatives, and isolation from the rest of the labor movement, as Unifor left the Canadian Labour Congress in 2018.

Finally, in a concluding chapter for the ages, Ross and Savage chronicle the culmination of this long-term process: the fall from grace of Dias, forced into early retirement amid the COVID test kit kickback scandal and a subsequent cover-up attempt. The result was the first contested leadership election in the union’s history, leading to the rise to power of current Unifor President Lana Payne, who has sought to rebuild the union after the Dias scandal.

Throughout the book, Ross and Savage highlight the interplay between structure and agency. The CAW/Unifor political shift was not simply the result of craven union bureaucrats selling out the members and cozying up to the bosses. Rather, they present the shift as a result of officials acting within structural constraints: economic shifts, political betrayals, and employer attacks.

There are also structural constraints within the union. Most notable here is the role of the Administration Caucus, rebranded as the Unity Team with the creation of Unifor. This was the leadership caucus that, from the 1940s until very recently, functioned as the one party in the union’s one-party state. As the authors show, this made it difficult for dissenting voices to gain a hearing within the union.

Ironically, the creation of the CAW in 1985 accentuated this problem, as the Canadian Council, once a source of debate and dissent within the union, became subsumed under the National Executive Board. Instead, the focus within the union turned to proving loyalty to the leadership, with the carrot of lucrative staff positions serving as a material incentive to obey. This gave top leadership free rein to pull the union in a more opportunistic direction, and with Dias, ultimately toward corruption.

Another Path?

One of the great contributions of this book is the authors’ account of the role of the Administration Caucus within the UAW. It is poorly documented even for the United States, but this to my knowledge is the first time we have gotten the Canadian side of the story.

More generally, the value of this book is the care with which it studies the internal dynamics of a labor union. There are simply not enough studies like this, especially for Canadian labor, and we need more of them.

For understandable reasons, much labor scholarship focuses on specific strikes or campaigns, not on the development of unions as institutions. But the day-to-day reality of the modern labor movement is dominated by unions as institutions, whether we like it or not. And it is not enough either to take these institutions for granted and just study their actions in a particular case, or to dismiss them as conservative, bureaucratic entities. We need to understand them as organizations and as polities.

Ross and Savage do an incredible job of portraying CAW/Unifor as a living, breathing, evolving organization. If there is something missing in this regard, it might be a broader sense of the union as a polity. For understandable reasons, the authors’ primary focus is on the union’s elected leadership and key staff. Members’ voices do not figure quite as much in the book’s narrative, although they do play a critical role in the union. We have been reminded of this in recent years as members have asserted their voice independently of the leadership by rejecting major contracts or passing them with narrower-than-expected margins.

At a broader level, I see the value of this book as providing a detailed look at a perplexing process we are seeing at work not just in Canada, but around the world: the delinking of economic protest and political reform.

As I have argued, one of the defining features of our current political moment is that, unlike previous periods, labor mobilization is not shifting the political terrain to the left, nor is it producing tangible left policy reforms. Instead, it is accompanied by increasing political cynicism and the rise of a populist right. Ross and Savage’s account of the CAW/Unifor’s political shifts offers a fine-grained examination of how this de-linking process unfolded.

Compromised social democratic parties hemmed in by budget austerity and the exhaustion of social democratic ideas alienate their union allies, who are then themselves constrained by the restriction of their political options. In this context, a move toward more pragmatic, transactional politics seems like a rational response, as a more transformative political vision is not on offer. But longer term, it has a corrosive effect, encouraging cynicism about politics while also failing to deliver gains for workers.

The result is a crisis of political representation that erodes labor’s ability to provide a political center of gravity, disorients union leaders and members alike, and creates a breeding ground for right populism.

This, in broad strokes, is the story that Ross and Savage tell of CAW/Unifor’s break with the NDP and its turn first toward strategic voting, then even toward opportunistic dalliances with anti-union right-wing populists like Ontario premier Doug Ford.

If I were to point to a place where I was hoping for more from this book, it would be for a more explicit explanation of why the shift Ross and Savage describe happened. It is not that such an explanation is totally missing. There are several key factors the authors highlight: the rise of neoliberalism, trade policy and shifts in manufacturing, and the bureaucratization of the Administration Caucus are some chief culprits. But in keeping with the idea of balancing structure and agency, I would have liked to see the authors identify points where an alternate path was possible. What would have been necessary for the CAW to retain its broader vision?

Overall, these are small complaints, better understood as invitations to further reflection and discussion. With labor on the move in the United States and Canada on a scale not seen in decades, the questions that Ross and Savage raise in their book regarding labor politics and strategy have a current relevance that is far from academic.