Union Spin Too Little, Too Bitchy, Too Late

The Canadian Autoworkers’ Union is appalled that GM is closing factories that produce trucks and performance cars.

Their showdown with management fizzled recently when the courts ruled they couldn’t blockade GM offices and plants just because they don’t like decisions made by management.

How utterly lame.

CAW head Buzz Hargrove was patting himself on the back a couple of years ago, when GM announced they would be producing Camaros in Canada.

Was the company’s increasing reliance on the high profit margins of SUVs, power cars and pick-up trucks a good long-term direction for the company?

Let’s see, gas prices steadily rising. Concern for the environment sharpening world wide. Emissions legislation on the horizon, and the big Asian car companies solidifying their hold on the market for fuel-efficient cars. 

Yeah, GM betting the bank on muscle cars was a praiseworthy move.

Only someone who was indifferent to the company’s future (or just very very dim) would have thought they were headed in the right direction.

Now the CAW is urging its members to shame GM into cancelling or postponing planned plant closures in Canada.

The real shame should come to the union leaders, who continue to pursue an antagonistic approach to labor relations in an era when the best intentions, thinking and effort of workers and management are desperately needed to keep North American companies from losing even more market share.

We don’t need bigger protest rallies, unless they’re rallies to argue for a greater investment by government and the private sector in education, infrastructure and R&D.

We don’t need empty rhetoric. We need collaboration and vision. The incredible sustained prosperity of the North American auto industry blinded more than a few people to the unrelenting shift to better designed, more fuel-efficient vehicles. But if the CAW was really on their watch, they should not have joined the ranks of the optimists who thought the prosperity could never end.

The CAW may think that it’s not their responsibility to identify the moves automakers need to make to stay relevant and competitive. In that case, they don’t understand modern business.

It’s unfortunate that a high Canadian dollar, combined with threatened carbon taxes and soaring gas prices is costing thousands of Canadian jobs. But it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Real leaders would have responded to the coming crisis by pushing for changes to the industry, even at the cost of some short-term opportunities.

Instead, the union leaders are angrily calling for increasingly confrontational tactics, just in case the manufacturers’ management and boards had any doubt about whether Canada’s plants and workers should continue to bear the brunt of the sudden lurch from investment to retrenchment. Just in case they thought, even for a moment, that those workers were their fellow-travellers on the downturn path. The CAW is not in a partnership with management. They are not there to be part of the solution. They are, as ever, aggressive, stubborn and rude.

At a time when the auto industry is coping with the need for radical change, it’s good to know the CAW can be relied on for something.

Photo by Buglugs, via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons attribution license (generic, 2.0).