Canadian Auto Workers occupy parts plant in Scarborough, ON

Due to a market flooded with both domestic and foreign automotive products, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and General Motors have, over the last 5 years, laid off tens of thousands of autoworkers to protect their coffers. As layoffs continue, instead of mounting any sort of resistance, the leadership of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union has only […]

  • Julian Benson
  • Tue, Apr 10, 2007
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Due to a market flooded with both domestic and foreign automotive products, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and General Motors have, over the last 5 years, laid off tens of thousands of autoworkers to protect their coffers. As layoffs continue, instead of mounting any sort of resistance, the leadership of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union has only shaken their heads and muttered condolences for their fellow workers’ plight. Workers were left to face the oncoming hardships on their own. The leaders of the CAW have, following the example of union President Buzz Hargrove, acted more like the bosses’ middlemen than as defenders of workers’ rights.

For every assembly line autoworker laid off, there are several more parts and support workers who feel the sting of the market just as harshly. The Collins & Aikman (C&A) parts plant in Scarborough, Ontario, a working class suburb of Toronto, is filled with such workers. The parts manufacturer, C&A, declared bankruptcy in the US last year, with Ford, DaimlerChrysler and GM taking de-facto ownership of the company. Early this year C&A announced that it would be closing down its Scarborough operation, as well. The CAW leaders quickly negotiated a modest severance package and thought the matter would be closed without incident. Last week, however, the C&A committee in charge of overseeing the closure of the factory announced that it would not be honouring the severance agreement. On Friday, the 31st of March, workers at the Scarborough plant learned that the company would be removing the machinery and moulds from the facility the next morning. Outraged at the company’s underhanded tactics and in an amazing display of rank-and-file militancy, solidarity and spontaneity, the plant’s workers organized themselves overnight to prevent the removal of a single scrap of equipment from their workplace.

Friday night the workers told management to leave and set to work occupying the factory. At 7am Saturday March 31st, trucks from C&A arrived to find the gates of the Scarborough plant barricaded with forklifts, a stretch of chain link fence and a vibrant picket line. Fighting back tears, veteran worker of 30 years, Josephine Ebanks, expressed a sentiment all too familiar to Canadian workers, “I’ve worked my ass off the best I can and at the end I get zip? I‘m going to be here everyday until I get my money.” Within hours of the occupation, solidarity strikes were occurring at parts’ plants in Guelph and Ingersoll, Ontario. Postal workers and Steelworkers also took solidarity action. All of this was being done solely by the rank-and-file, completely independent from the CAW leadership.

The occupation, as well as the solidarity strikes, took the Hargrove administration completely by surprise. Workers were actually rejecting their leader’s accommodating attitude towards the bosses and taking a militant stand for their rights. An awakened rank-and-file is the labour bureaucrat’s worst fear because it threatens their cushy position in the movement with a struggle to fight back against the owners and their cuts. After only 36 hours the Scarborough occupation was already garnering support from plants all over the province and was set to become a focal point for a wider mobilization of the rank-and-file. Hargrove, formerly a left-winger, has since abandoned any idea of class struggle and instead plead for conciliation and government handouts. The union leaders quickly went to work trying to defuse the situation and immediately accepted the first offer that was proposed. DaimlerChrysler and Ford agreed to pay $1.8 million and $1.45 million each towards the severance in exchange for an end to the barricade—an offer that was readily accepted by the CAW leaders. However, the original severance package was worth $6 million, leaving a $2.8 million dollar gap. Though the CAW leaders promised to put pressure on GM to pay the remainder, they ended the barricade after only two days, even though the occupation was gaining huge support from workers across Ontario, and rattling the big three to their foundations.

Despite the selling out of the Hargrove administration, this occupation can be seen as a tremendous step forward for the labour movement in Ontario and Canada. There are some in the upper echelons of the movement that try and justify their conciliatory attitude toward the bosses by suggesting that Canadian workers are comfortable and content, and that there is no reason for militancy or action. This occupation concretely proves the opposite to be true. Canadian workers have had enough of being sold out by their so-called leaders and have had enough of sacrificing their standards of living for the sake of the bosses. Unlike the “moderates” that dominate the leadership of the unions and NDP, the workers in Scarborough have shown that rank-and-file militancy and direct action are the real ways to win.

This occupation is more than a victory for one group of workers; it is a sign of things to come. Workers need only look to Venezuela to see the enormous power of worker’s control, as thousands of factories have been retaken and put to work in an attempt to build an equitable, just, and socialist society. Canadian workers need not passively accept the future being offered to them by political careerists and capitalists; they can fight to retake their rights. If the same militancy shown in Scarborough were to manifest itself into a tendency capable of leading the labour movement, all the jobs lost to corporate cuts could not only be retaken, but retaken under a system of workers’ control. Such a system, spread throughout the economy is the only way to end the constant attacks against the working-class that occur under capitalism. To those who have said that Canadian workers are too content and moderate to be won to the militancy of socialism, they need only to look to the workers that brought the big three to their knees—these workers were hardly content, and moderate…and they achieved the gains that they did because of this attitude, and despite their conciliatory union leadership.

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