Abstract
Industrial workers and their organizations are faced with two interrelated crises as the continued reorganization of production shutters plants and devastates communities while the existential threat of climate change grows. Addressing both crises at once often seems impossible. This article offers a critical analysis of a campaign by unionists and community allies to confront both crises at once, to see their shuttering auto plant taken over and retooled for socially useful production. The failure of the campaign to win its demands or build a critical mass of support within the union emphasizes the importance and difficulty of inspiring workers to imagine radical alternatives during times of crisis.
Introduction
There is an urgent need to convert manufacturing to address the climate crisis. There is also a need to prevent production facilities like Oshawa from being abandoned. Canada needs to retain the capacity to produce useful products for our communities. We need good jobs for workers and our families. -Green Jobs Oshawa Leaflet, 2019
Workers and their organizations in Canada, and around the world, are facing a double crisis. Global society continues toward irreversible climate catastrophe and unions continue to search for an effective way to overcome the constant threat of capital mobility brought about by neoliberalism's free trade agenda. In Canada and the United States, activists and progressive organizations have begun to rally around the promise of a Green New Deal, arguing that the urgency of climate crisis calls for public works on a scale not seen since the Great Depression and World War Two. The world's largest corporate polluters—by some estimates, responsible for as much as two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions (Starr 2016)—have only recently begun to yield to calls for sustainability and corporate environmental responsibility, after being left to their own devices for a half century based on the decidedly false assumption that if climate change was really that serious capitalist markets would eventually generate solutions all on their own. For proponents of a Green New Deal, this turn to “green capitalism” is too little and far too late. At the same time, decades of plant closure and relocation have left communities across Canada and the United States that relied on good, unionized jobs struggling to adapt as once-productive manufacturing capacity sits idle and unused.
In Oshawa, Ontario, this is a familiar story. On November 26, 2018, General Motors (GM) announced it would cease assembly operations at its Oshawa, Ontario assembly plant, bringing to an end more than 100 years of automobile production in the city. This would come as part of a larger restructuring move by the company that would also see four plants in the United States shuttered as the automaker sought to cut costs and focus more of its attention on autonomous and electric vehicles (Lewis 2018). The announcement was hardly a surprise. Just two years earlier the local union to which the workers belong, Unifor Local 222, had waged a public campaign to put pressure on GM to commit to the plant's future (Fairweather 2022). The size of the unionized workforce inside the plant had dwindled from its peak of well over 20,000 workers in the 1980s to fewer than 2,000 by the time the closure announcement was made.
The response from the union was swift, and from the workers themselves, even swifter, as hundreds of autoworkers walked off the job in protest. In the days and months that followed, two different (and in important ways, competing) campaigns were launched in hopes of securing the plant's future in the community. One campaign was organized by the national union and local leadership, and the other by a small group of rank-and-file members, retirees, and community activists. This latter campaign, called Green Jobs Oshawa, has sought to link the future of the plant to the fight against climate change by calling for public ownership and worker control. In doing so, it has challenged the established common sense and brought itself into open conflict with the national union, Unifor. 1 In this paper, I offer a critical analysis of the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign, considered alongside both the national Save Oshawa GM campaign and the 2016 GM Oshawa Matters campaign, setting the more radical and ambitious campaign in its historical and institutional contexts. My analysis reveals both the importance and the limitations of such campaigns with respect to rank-and-file internationalism and the prospects for restored worker power in the fight to save jobs and the planet in an age of intensified globalization. The campaign reveals the continued importance of ideology and internal union politics in the making of union strategy on globalization and climate change alike. Ultimately, the failure of the campaign—not just to win its demands, but to build a critical mass of support within the union—emphasizes the importance and difficulty of inspiring workers to imagine radical alternatives during times of crisis.
There is now a large body of literature exploring the consequences of globalization for workers and their organizations, reinforcing the need for new strategies to renew worker power in the face of global capital (Moody 1997; Johns 1998; Herod 2001a, 2001b; Lévesque and Murray 2002; Munck 2002; Silver 2003; Evans 2010, 2014; McCallum 2013; Ness 2016; Brookes 2019; Fox-Hodess 2020). At the same time, labour studies research has also developed a sophisticated analysis of the politics of labour environmentalism, critically examining union efforts to build coalitions with environmental organizations and pursue better environmental politics within their own actions (Keil 1994; Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011; Nugent 2011; Savage and Soron 2011; Snell and Fairbrother 2011; Soron 2012; Lundström 2017; Snell 2018; Stevis, Uzzell and Räthzel 2018). However, these bodies of research are seldom, if ever, considered together. This is a problematic gap in our understanding because climate change is a global threat and unions’ ability to effectively intervene on the matter depends on unions restoring worker power more generally speaking in the new global era.
Rank-and-file internationalism played a key role in the emergence and development of the campaign. In earlier campaigns against the threat of plant closure, no efforts were made to connect with other workers across the border. The fact that the closure announcement affected facilities in both countries partly explains this pivot to internationalism, but this is not the only factor. Ideology and political conflict between competing factions are also important causal factors. As rank-and-file socialists, communists, and anarchists in both countries adopted an internationalist and environmentalist orientation promoting public ownership in response to the closure announcement, the national union and members of the in-plant leadership doubled-down on nationalist sabre-rattling and the scapegoating of Mexican autoworkers. The national union's campaign represents the continuation of a long trajectory away from militancy and direct action leveraging structural power and towards the politics of partnership and class collaboration leveraging institutional and coalitional forms of power. 2 However, the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign has also relied heavily on coalitional power and has so far been unable to find much support among the in-plant membership of the union or channel the will to militancy on display when workers first walked off the job into more concrete action in support of the campaign's demands. Without the active support of a majority of the workers inside the plant, it is hard for the campaign to legitimately call for worker control of the facility.
This article is based on 18 semi-structured key informant interviews, conducted in two sets, and a review of relevant union and campaign materials (some of which are publicly available and some of which I received from interview participants). The first set of interviews was conducted in 2017 and focused on the 2016 GM Oshawa Matters campaign. The eight interviewees in that round were rank-and-file members and local leaders of Local 222, and those conversations mostly dealt with internal Unifor politics, the threat of globalization, the prospects for labour nationalism and internationalism, and the specifics of the campaign. The second set of interviews was conducted in 2021 and 2022. This time, 10 participants were interviewed, including rank-and-file activists of Local 222 (4 participants from the 2017 round of interviews were interviewed again), former Canadian Auto Workers union (CAW) staff, unionists from other CAW locals, activists in the local labour movement in and around Oshawa, and one rank-and-file member of the United Auto Workers union (UAW) Local 598 from Flint, Michigan. The topics covered in these interviews varied more widely as a result of the wider variety of participants. Generally speaking, participants discussed the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign and the local union politics surrounding it, their experiences participating in rank-and-file internationalism, and the development of the CAW/Unifor's politics over time within and between different scales of the organization.
Global Solidarity Beats Global Greed
The fight against climate change is fundamentally a global exercise. The world's ecosystems don’t recognize our borders, and so while climate change is largely driven by a small handful of countries, its effects are felt everywhere. Those effects are also unequal and not in proportion to a country's contribution to global carbon emissions. Furthermore, most greenhouse gas emissions are coming not just from a small handful of countries, but from a small handful of companies, both private and publicly owned (Starr 2016). And while consumers play a role in driving climate change through the choices they make, those choices occur within the structures of fossil fuel capitalism and automobility to such an extent that meaningful individual action on climate change is next to impossible without confronting the multinational corporations responsible, including GM (Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011). The power of capital to structure workplaces and society in accordance with its own profit motives is the root cause of both climate change and the decades-long wave of plant closures across the old industrial heartland of North America, and so there is very little sense in treating the two crises as separate. When we do, we’re most often left with solutions to one crisis that simply reinforce the other.
The long and ongoing history of conflict between unions and the politics of environmental justice is well-documented (Keil 1994; Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011; Nugent 2011; Soron 2012; Snell 2018; Stevis, Uzzell and Räthzel 2018). As Roger Keil (1994, 15) writes, “there is a real and material tension between jobs and the environment in the capitalist economy.” All of the injuries that capital brings upon the planet are ultimately carried out by working people whose livelihoods depend on those jobs, from the loggers clear-cutting the rainforest to the autoworkers who assemble gas-guzzling pick-up trucks. As Keil also points out, however, this narrative contains a class bias—as the argument tends to focus on the autoworker and the logger, while the white collar Google engineer whose job relies on massive electricity-devouring data centres tends to escape any scrutiny—and the dilemma it presents is ultimately false. As much as workers may have an interest in remaining employed, they have a much greater interest in preserving a liveable planet and avoiding the substantial upheavals climate change threatens if left unaddressed. In the case of the CAW/Unifor, however, confronting the climate crisis has historically come second to the principle objective of protecting jobs. Despite the union's official commitments to social unionism and its relatively militant and class-conscious history, the CAW/Unifor has tended towards a “relatively uncritical defense of the North American auto industry and the jobs it provides,” rather than taking seriously the climate consequences of the products those jobs produce (Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011, 6). Some have noted that the CAW's social unionism inspired a relative sensitivity to environmental issues compared to some other unions throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (Adkin 1998), but by the 2000s the desire to defend good union jobs irrespective of their environmental consequences was well-established, especially in sectors like auto where the loss of unionized jobs to restructuring had been substantial (Nugent 2011). The union has increasingly adopted a “just transition” approach (one that, in the case of the automotive industry, mostly involves lobbying the government to entice automakers to assemble electric vehicles and related components like batteries in Canada by providing public subsidies) but in times of crisis such as the impending closure of the Oshawa facility, the union has struggled to continue to prioritize environmental concerns. 3 Despite the many contradictions, it is also true that “workers have been at the core of many struggles for the improvement and the protection of our natural environment, particularly at the workplace” (Keil 1994, 7–8).
Workers and their organizations have the power to shape not only their own workplaces, but the world around them, and in recent years, research has increasingly sought to examine the different forms of power resources workers and their organizations have access to (Silver 2003; Brookes 2013). The power resources approach holds that unions and workers derive their various power resources from the fact that they and their employers are embedded in and dependent upon various systems, including systems of production and circulation (“structural power”), legal and regulatory systems (“institutional power”), and systems of community (“associational power”) (Silver 2003, 13–16; Brookes 2013, 194). These forms of power are distinct but also fundamentally interconnected. Historically, forms of institutional power have been granted to unions by the state as a means to contain more militant expressions of structural and associational power—often with the explicit caveat that certain expressions such as wildcat strikes or general strikes are deemed unlawful (Wells 1995; Fudge and Tucker 2004; Panitch and Swartz 2008; Camfield 2011; Swartz and Warskett 2012). Associational power includes forms of coalitional power—wherein workers and their organizations forge and leverage relationships with other community organizations to broaden the scope of conflict, share information and resources, and create additional pressure on the targets of their efforts (Tufts 1998; Ross 2011)—and forms of symbolic power leveraged through “moral suasion” by making arguments to shape public opinion to the benefit of workers and their organizations (Savage 2019, 168).
This power resources approach to understanding union action affords workers and their organizations some degree of agency, but it needs also to be recognized that this agency is only ever exercised within the structuring conditions of capitalism, in which capital makes use of its own distinct forms of power (Bieler 2018). As the neoliberal onslaught and the global reorganization of work put workers and their organizations on the defensive, the terrain on which power resources are mobilized has changed dramatically (Moody 1997; Silver 2003; Panitch and Swartz 2008). Across Canada, legislative changes to replace card check certification with mandatory elections have made it more difficult for workers to unionize and thereby access institutional power and legally-protected forms of structural power. Capital has always exploited geography to undermine workers’ structural power, even without free trade. Donald Wells (1995, 219), for example, writes about Ford moving substantial work to the non-union town of Oakville, Ontario in an effort to undermine union militancy in Windsor in the 1950s. However, the liberalization of trade and advances in transportation and communications technology have greatly enhanced the ability of firms to locate their operations in different places, whipsawing workers against one another and limiting the effects of disruption in one place (and undermining the ability of unionists to coordinate their efforts). At the same time, the relocation of industrial capital to new places has provoked the emergence of new workers’ movements (Silver 2003; Ness 2016) and the reorganization of global capital has increasingly relied on “just-in-time” production, opening up new structural vulnerabilities that workers can exploit (Moody 1997, Herod 2001a). A power resources approach to understanding union action must, therefore, consider the structuring conditions of capitalism as they develop and change over time, and contend with how the prospects for effective strategies change depending on the context.
It is generally acknowledged that the increasingly global terrain on which capital operates requires new kinds of strategies for workers and their organizations. For a time, it was popular to assert that free trade had brought about a “race to the bottom” in which workers around the world were pitted against one another, as capital could move production from one place to another, “whipsawing” its way to extracting endless concessions from workers everywhere. Against this assertion, two key arguments have been raised: first, that the relocation of capital to new places merely stimulates new workers’ movements to push back against the race to the bottom; and second, that the global reorganization of capital produces new vulnerabilities that workers and their unions can exploit.
Dockworkers in particular have often made effective use of structural power precisely because globalization intensifies capital's reliance on their labour to link far-flung supply chains and distribute goods to global markets (Brookes 2019). Steelworkers have at times been able to leverage associational power on a global scale, as was the case in the 1992 Ravenswood Aluminum lockout in West Virginia, and autoworkers have still been able to leverage substantial structural power with strikes despite the ability of capital to produce the same vehicles in multiple places, as strikes at just one facility can quickly spread through the supply chain causing shut downs in other facilities (Herod 2001b). As a result of both the damage capital mobility has done to workers, their unions, and the planet, and of the new opportunities for disruption and cooperation afforded to labour by globalization, there is also a substantial body of literature dedicated to the hopeful prospect of global solidarity and labour inter-/transnationalism.
For a time, the common sense was that globalization was a terminal crisis for unions in places like Canada and the United States. Against this common sense emerged a persuasive argument that many of the things that allowed for this intensification of capital's global strategy—advances in transportation and communications technology, in particular—also made a sort of global countermovement by labour not only possible, but likely (Munck 2002; Evans 2010). The modern labour movement has more or less always been an international endeavour. International unions played a vital role in the development of the labour movement in Canada and the United States and there is a long history of international union cooperation, from the old International Trade Secretariats to the modern Global Unions. In the face of accelerating globalization, many unions have developed explicitly international strategies. Some have attempted to establish Global Framework Agreements with multinational corporations to ensure a basic minimum standard for labour rights is respected everywhere they operate, while others have sought to create new cross-border alliances and establish new relationships with global non-governmental organizations (McCallum 2013; Evans 2014).
Much of this work is extremely distant, both physically and conceptually, from the shop floor, and so some have advocated for and explored the possibilities of rank-and-file internationalisms as a counter to the distinct possibility of an ossifying global business unionism (Moody 1997, Waterman 2001; Nastovski 2016; Fox-Hodess 2020). Few examples of rank-and-file internationalism have been examined, perhaps because they are so difficult to sustain, but those studies that do exist emphasize the role that grassroots internationalism can play in unsettling deeply-rooted patterns of business unionism (Nastovski 2014), establishing and building stronger links between unions in different countries (Nastovski 2016, 76), and lending itself to greater militancy and a sense of community across borders (Fox-Hodess 2020, 105). This work is important because, as Rebecca Johns (1998, 257) argues, “as long as the struggle is over the geographic distribution of a limited number of jobs across the terrain of uneven development, workers cannot win. There will always be workers in other places who, in order to survive, will work for lower wages and tolerate harsher conditions.” But despite the importance of building global solidarity, when faced with one of the most immediate material consequences of globalization—the closure of a plant—the response from workers and their unions, at least in the Global North, has far more often been to scapegoat workers in other countries as foreign competition and invoke the symbolic power of national unity in a bid to build broad associational power in moments where the prospects for leveraging structural power seem particularly grim.
As we will see, the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign represents an attempt to overcome both of the apparent dilemmas that emerge from these interconnected crises of globalization and climate change. In order to understand the prospects and limitations of a campaign like this, we first need to situate it in its historical and institutional context.
Prologue: Plant Closures, Worker Power, and the CAW
The UAW in Canada encountered a wave of plant closures beginning in the 1970s, during a time when deindustrialization was being explicitly linked to the domination of the Canadian economy by the United States (High 2001). For the emerging left-nationalist movement, plant closures were symptomatic of the problem of American ownership of major Canadian industries. When push came to shove, it was argued, American bosses would always choose American workers at the expense of their Canadian operations. “Admittedly simplified” (High 2001, 213) though this characterization clearly was, it became a powerful frame for resistance and it galvanized community support for a number of militant responses to plant closures throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In Oshawa, for example, nearly two hundred workers occupied the Houdaille bumper plant following the August 1980 announcement that the plant would close, less than one year after the purchase of the company by an American corporation was approved by Canada's Foreign Investment Review Agency (High 2001, 216–218). According to Stephen High (2001, 217), “economic nationalism lent the occupation a sense of urgency as well as an added aura of national purpose,” and in recognition of the importance of the action, “the Canadian UAW accorded strike pay in an illegal strike for the first time in its history.”
Following its high-profile split from the UAW, the CAW embodied the hopes and aspirations of Canada's left nationalists and those who believed in the promise of renewed labour militancy in the country. The split was the result of tensions within the international union regarding autonomy for the Canadian membership that had been building for many years, and it came after nearly two decades of left-nationalist agitation regarding what some perceived to be the increasingly conservative influence of international unions in Canadian politics (Gindin 1989; Blocker 2021). The new union was not a wholesale rejection of the UAW, nor was it an embrace of the left-nationalist movement. Rather, it was a rejection of the UAW's increasing comfort with accepting concessions and a move toward the kind of autonomy necessary to preserve the Canadian division's no-concessions approach to bargaining. The union's leadership had significant concerns about the kind of nationalism that might take hold in the union following the split, and there was a strong desire to preserve the legacy of internationalism the UAW in Canada had cultivated (Gindin 1989). Following the split, the CAW also continued to practice the “incipient nationalism and workplace militancy” (Yates 1998, 105) it had derived from the UAW's brand of social unionism (Ross 2011, 83). That legacy carried on for many decades following the split, though the form and character of the CAW's nationalism and its approach to workplace militancy would shift dramatically over time.
In 1996, the union fought a three-week strike against GM over mandatory overtime and outsourcing. While Chrysler—the target company in that round of bargaining—had already agreed to stronger anti-outsourcing language, General Motors was planning to sell its Northern Fabrication plant in Oshawa, and so it refused to agree to a moratorium on outsourcing (Schneider 1996; Debling 2004). The effects of the strike spread quickly, as plants in the United States depended on parts produced in Canada to operate, resulting in at least 1,850 layoffs in several American plants (L.A. Times 1996). In response, GM sought an injunction to open up the picket lines, planning to remove essential dies from the North Fab plant for use elsewhere. When they learned of GM's plan to remove the dies from the Fab plant so that it could keep its U.S. operations going, the union took action. According to then-president of Local 222, Mike Shields: When General Motors said they were going to move some key dies out of the plant to keep some US operations running, we knew they were actually challenging the Union. That night we had to come up with a plan to stop them. Our first plan was to surround the plant with vehicles and cause a lock-jam, but because of the lack of time, this was at two or three o’clock in the morning, we finally decided that it would be better off just to go into the plant and take it over. We had the resources; the skilled trades workers came with us and were welding the doors shut. (Debling 2004, 17)
Unlike the Houdaille confrontation, the 1996 North Plant occupation wasn’t framed along explicitly national lines, since the previous fight was over a change in ownership rather than the removal of work to another facility. This is also true of a number of other plant occupations of the day. While the April 1999 occupation of the Johnson Controls plant in Stratford, Ontario (successfully) sought to prevent work from being moved to Mexico, Molson workers also occupied their Barrie, Ontario plant later that same year seeking the right to follow their jobs to Etobicoke, Ontario, just an hour's drive away (CAW-Canada 2010, 104, 109). While nationalism has been an effective device for galvanizing militancy in the face of plant closures where relevant, the threat of job loss has often been enough on its own to spark a militant response to plant closures where there is not such an obvious geopolitical framing to invoke. As the union's more recent history reveals, nationalist framings for union action are also wholly compatible with far less militant approaches to unionism, and they often veer into partnership and class collaboration, symbolic politics in lieu of direct action, and at times, outright racism and xenophobia (Fairweather 2022; see also Frank 2002).
The Campaigns
GM Oshawa Matters
The 2016 GM Oshawa Matters campaign started in response to what local activists and members of the business press saw as clear indications that GM's long-term commitment to Oshawa was in question (Peterborough Examiner 2014; Keenan 2016; Snavely 2016). In-plant leadership approached members of the union's Paid Education Leave program and tasked them with the development of a campaign to put pressure on the automaker to commit long term to the Oshawa plant, which only had allocated product through the end of 2019. The campaign they put together built upon the legacy of the earlier “Made in Canada Matters” campaign, launched in 2006 to bring attention to the growing crisis in Canadian manufacturing (CAW-Canada 2010, 139), and it was very much a continuation of the nationalist politics that had been developing in the union over previous decades.
Campaign materials highlighted the Canadian Government's bailout of the automaker during the 2008 financial crisis, during which time the union had been asked repeatedly (and agreed) to make substantial concessions in order to secure the funds for GM. According to campaign materials, the deal included a commitment to bring production of GM's first hybrid truck to Oshawa, only to see the automaker announce the closure of the truck plant less than a month later (Leah 2020). The closure of the truck plant provoked a blockade of GM's Canadian headquarters, also located in Oshawa, with unionists rallying around a call for “Fair Trade, Not Free Trade” and encouraging Canadians to create local jobs by buying domestic. The union brought a large banner that read: “World Class Quality + World Class Productivity = OUR JOBS TO MEXICO THANKS GM.” The blockade lasted for 12 days, and letters of support poured in from around the country and beyond. GM workers in South Africa sent a letter pledging their support in the face of such a “betrayal” because “now more than ever we should be united and speak with one voice as a GM family” (CAW Local 222 2012, 101). GM ultimately succeeded in winning an injunction to stop the blockade, though the judge noted how egregious the company had been in almost immediately breaking its deal and awarded the union three more days to carry on its protest (CAW Local 222, 104). Despite how profound the betrayal was relative to earlier conflicts with GM, there was no occupation or sit-in in response to the closure of the Truck Plant, and vehicles continued to roll off the lines. As was the case in so many earlier fights against plant closure, the union's major victory was a closure agreement including enhanced retirement incentives and vehicle vouchers. The magnitude of the betrayal and the slight it represented, not just against autoworkers but against the Canadian taxpayer, would not soon be forgotten. In fact, it would inform many of the choices made by union leadership and rank-and-file activists alike in the coming years.
The GM Oshawa Matters campaign made explicit use of both the bailout and the threat of foreign competition from Mexico in its attempt to pressure the automaker to commit to Oshawa. Campaign t-shirts were printed that read: “Canada Didn’t Bail Out GM For Them To Invest In Mexico.” Banners were held over the busy 401 highway overpasses that read: “Keep Good Jobs In Canada” and “GM Moving To Mexico, China.” Using the symbolic politics of nationalism and highlighting the automaker's lack of loyalty, the campaign leveraged significant associational power in the form of coalitions with local community groups such as We Are Oshawa and found support among members of the local business community as well. The Local's Retired Workers Chapter was also heavily involved in the campaign. GM Oshawa Matters also sought to tie in the politics of climate change, lobbying for a “Green GM” and encouraging GM to “Plug Into Oshawa” by allocating hybrid and electric products for the plant. Overall, though, the environmental politics of the campaign were underdeveloped, appended on principle but subordinate to the main goal of securing investment and a commitment to the plant.
The conclusion of the 2016 round of bargaining brought with it a sigh of relief for concerned autoworkers who believed that the new contract included language that would ensure their jobs through the 2020 expiration of the agreement. The campaign had succeeded in bringing community and media attention to the precarious future of the historic plant, and it had inspired significant engagement by other workers inside the plant. Unfortunately, GM's commitment to Oshawa proved to be yet another deception, and the suspicions that the automaker planned to close the plant at the end of 2019 when its final allocation of product ran out were confirmed. News began to leak on November 25, 2018 that a closure announcement was coming, and on the following day GM formally announced that it was going to close the Oshawa assembly plant alongside four other plants in the United States (Ligaya 2018).
Save Oshawa GM
In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, hundreds of autoworkers walked off the job, and an emergency meeting was held at the union hall. Unifor's National President, Jerry Dias, was on hand, promising that GM wouldn’t close the Oshawa plant “without one hell of a fight” (Findlay 2020). The nature of that fight was to be decided largely at Unifor's head office, far from the shop floor in Oshawa. The workers were told that the best thing they could do was to continue to do what they did best: build high quality, profitable automobiles for GM. In a Shop Committee Update released on November 29, 2018, the following rationale was put forward: Everyone is frustrated and angry—and rightfully so—but the time for further job action is not now. As a Union we are planning a campaign that is committed to keeping Oshawa open and it provides us with tremendous leverage for the Company to know that when your union calls upon you, you will show up. At this time, the best way you can support yourself and your union is to continue to report for your regular shifts and do what you do best, build the highest quality vehicles in the industry. By doing this, it helps prove that we deserve to keep our jobs. (Unifor Local 222 2018a)
The Save Oshawa GM campaign was built on many of the same narrative devices as the GM Oshawa Matters campaign, focusing on the fact that Canada had bailed out GM during the height of the financial crisis and was therefore owed more loyalty than this. The national union worked closely with local leadership, and they pushed a message rooted in economic nationalism. At first, signs were produced reading “if GM pulls out of Oshawa, this is the last GM vehicle I buy” (Unifor Local 222 2018b). However, the union stopped short of ever outright calling for a boycott of all GM products. Instead, the call was eventually made to boycott GM vehicles assembled in Mexico, in hopes that Canadian consumers would place economic pressure on the automaker to reverse its decision (Unifor 2019). The decision not to boycott all GM products struck some in the Local as being at odds with the basic principle of solidarity. It seemed clear that the decision was made out of concern for the many other Canadian workers whose jobs depended on the sale of GM products assembled in Canada. One rank-and-file member of the union summarized their concerns as follows: “No, we can’t do boycotts because we have Unifor members who are working at other GM plants. We don’t want to hurt our members at CAMI, or St. Catharines, or Woodstock. We have Unifor members who work with the dealerships. We don’t want to impact other working Canadian families and stuff.” So why in the world, if we’re following that logic, is it okay to call for a boycott of Mexican-made GM vehicles? Like, that is I think a bit of the opposite of solidarity. You’re not willing to do it to yourself, but you’re willing to do it to someone else (Interview 10).
The campaign succeeded in getting GM's attention. Unifor National ran television ads, including an expensive spot during the Super Bowl, which prompted a cease and desist letter from GM over what they described as false claims “designed intentionally and maliciously to mislead Canadian consumers and forever tarnish GM's reputation with them” (CBC News 2019). In May 2019, Unifor settled the grievance, with GM agreeing to bring an after-market auto parts stamping operation to the Oshawa facility. The deal secured 300 jobs for Local 222 members and, perhaps more importantly, it kept the plant open. The Union would live to fight another day, even if Oshawa would no longer assemble vehicles. The National Union agreed to suspend its campaign as part of the grievance settlement and would aim to make the matter of restoring assembly an issue in the 2020 round of bargaining with GM.
Green Jobs Oshawa
The Green Jobs Oshawa campaign represents a radical departure from how the union has tended to respond to the threat of plant closure. It was launched by some of the rank-and-file members who had been involved in the GM Oshawa Matters campaign, and while it made use of the 2016 campaign's social media infrastructure by rebranding existing pages and leveraging existing networks, it differed from the earlier campaign in almost every conceivable way. Rather than trying to put public pressure on the automaker to commit to continuing to build vehicles in Oshawa, the campaign put forward a bold (though not unprecedented) proposal to have the Government of Canada purchase the plant and place it under the control of the workers and the community to build socially useful products (Green Jobs Oshawa 2019). Similar proposals have been made before, including the 1970 Lucas Plan in the United Kingdom, to convert arms production to socially useful products, and the 1991 Green Work Alliance proposals in response to the closure of the Brampton, Ontario Caterpillar plant (Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011, 21). However, Green Jobs Oshawa's proposal was directly at odds with what the National Union was trying to accomplish by shaming the automaker into committing to the plant.
Unlike the earlier GM Oshawa Matters campaign, which focused on the problem of foreign competition with Mexican workers, Green Jobs Oshawa pushed a message of global solidarity. That message sprung somewhat organically from the material reality of the situation. GM was closing four other plants in another country, after all, in addition to the Oshawa facility. In December 2018, just weeks after the announcement, rank-and-file socialists, communists, and anarchists at Local 222 became aware of a motion passed by their counterparts in UAW Local 22, representing workers at the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant, calling on all auto locals in the United States and Canada to form solidarity fightback committees. A leaflet circulated in support of that motion contained appeals to the need for international solidarity in the face of GM's attempt to use these plant closures to reinforce whipsawing and extract concessions from autoworkers everywhere (Unknown Author n.d.).
4
On January 18, 2019, a small group of rank-and-file Local 222 members and retirees travelled to Detroit, Michigan to participate in a rally sponsored by the Auto Workers Caravan, Detroit Democratic Socialists of America, the Coalition for a Green New Deal, and a number of other community organizations, in addition to the Unifor Local 222 Political Action Committee. One attendee recalled: We found out about that and we sent a busload of people from Oshawa. And that rally was organized around the idea of taking over GM, that if GM was going to, you know, walk away from the plant in Detroit—in Hamtramck—that the community should take it over, and use it for green production. So they advocated that idea and we participated in that and that had a really big influence in the eventual formation of Green Jobs Oshawa. I think that really inspired it more than anything else that we participated in that international demonstration, around the broader idea of if corporations are not providing jobs, and decent jobs, in a community then the community, the public, should have ownership and repurpose the plants and provide good jobs for workers building products that are socially useful, rather than harmful (Interview 9).
In addition to its international connections, the campaign also engaged in coalition building in the community and across the province. The campaign received support from the United Steelworkers Local 1005 in Hamilton, as well as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). CUPW had its own Delivering Community Power campaign seeking to turn Canada's postal service into a hub for new forms of sustainable, publicly-owned communications, banking, and other public services (CUPW, n.d.). The campaign received significant support from the local Labour Council—to which Unifor Local 222 was no longer affiliated following Unifor's high-profile split from the Canadian Labour Congress (Savage 2018)—and from the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). CUPE Ontario members, including President Fred Hahn, were involved in efforts to get a resolution endorsing Green Jobs Oshawa passed as an emergency resolution at the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) Convention in 2019 (Interview 14). The campaign also built connections with local students participating in weekly walkouts for the climate, and alongside the local community group, We Are Oshawa, established a Green New Deal Coalition. The campaign has also put together an educational program to teach environmentalists about unions and the prospects of a Green New Deal.
Inside the plant on the shop floor, however, the campaign has struggled to find much support. In part, this could be a consequence of the fact that many workers in the plant knew the National Union did not support the proposal, as one interviewee suggested (Interview 9). It could also be a consequence of just how defeated the general membership inside the plant had become by the time of the announcement, as another interviewee suggested (Interview 17). Whatever the cause, the inability of the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign to break through with the actual workers inside the plant is a significant hurdle, because it leaves the campaign without access to a substantial power resource—the workers’ structural power and their demonstrated willingness to use it by walking out or sitting down—and because it is very difficult for the campaign to legitimately argue in favour of workers’ control inside the plant without the support of those workers.
Analysis: Union Politics in Times of Crisis
Unifor's response to the threat of plant closure shifted dramatically in just a few years, and varied across the different levels of the organization as well. Comparing these various responses reveals a number of important lessons about worker power and union politics in times of crisis, the prospects for rank-and-file internationalism, and the enduring importance of both ideology and material conditions in the shaping of union strategy.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the CAW's response to plant closures was often militant and often informed by the union's unique brand of left nationalism. From the occupation of Houdaille in 1980 to the North Fab plant in 1996, the union was historically willing to use its structural power to take bold and often illegal action in defiance of the prerogatives of global capital. By 2008, the forms of militancy on display had become far more stage-managed and far less directly disruptive to the operation of capital. In 2018, in the face of the closure of one of the most important symbols of the Canadian autoworkers’ strength, the organic impulse to militancy was channeled into a grievance and a public boycott campaign that leveraged a different nationalism, one that made explicit scapegoats of Mexican autoworkers. Studies of the earlier period of militancy in the CAW reveal the extent to which factionalism inside the union drove a tendency toward direct action and conflict (Yates 1990). The union was for a time home to a well-organized left caucus that pushed a syndicalist and anti-capitalist orientation in the union and on the shop floor. In some ways the decline of the left inside the union mirrors the decline of the left in Canada more generally (Camfield 2011).
The neoliberal restructuring of the North American auto industry following the passage of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and then the North American Free Trade Agreement put the union on the defensive, and with the loss of the Auto Pact in 2001, the union lost much of what had given it confidence in the past. Even before the loss of the Auto Pact, the union was increasingly adopting what Wells describes as a “defensive unionism” in response to the “shift in the economic balance of class forces in [the auto] sector in the early 1990s” (Wells 1997, 169). In the years between the end of the Auto Pact and the 2008 financial collapse, the Canadian auto industry shed thousands of jobs, and what was left was increasingly reliant on larger vehicles, including many of the worst environmental offenders (Nugent 2011, 67). It is also true that restructuring has had a direct effect on the size and composition of the membership, and this has also affected the union's politics, as many of the union's most seasoned, experienced, and militant in-plant unionists have been lost to early retirement packages and buyouts (Fairweather 2022, 388). However, the will to militancy in the face of crisis still exists, despite the more precarious situation free trade has put these workers in. Changes in the material conditions faced by the union are therefore necessary but not sufficient to explain the declining willingness of the union's leadership to take direct action and leverage structural power against the automaker. As Charlotte Yates (1990, 75) argues, “external factors, such as the state of the economy, place limits on union choices and its capacity to effect chosen strategies. Within these limits, however, the internal dynamics of unions determine the course of action chosen and the success or failure of a particular strategy.” The growing reliance on institutional and coalitional forms of power instead of structural power is a consequence of the union's internal politics and it reflects the way that union power under free trade is interpreted by the union's leadership. In the absence of a well-organized left inside the plant to channel the will to militancy into sustained action not just against GM, but against the union's leadership, that militancy is easily diffused, much as it was in the earlier UAW period of the 1950s and 1960s, when wildcat strikes were punished by the union rather than encouraged (Yates 1990, 87).
The internal politics of the union have had a tremendous impact on what kinds of strategies are taken up. In 2016, the local in-plant leadership of the union encouraged the creation of a grassroots campaign to put pressure on GM, but this campaign received no real support from the national union. In fact, there was a sense among those involved that the national union would have preferred to work things out strictly at the bargaining table (Interview 5). In 2019, however, the grassroots campaign that emerged found very little support even among the in-plant leadership, who were busy supporting the Save Oshawa GM campaign. A motion of support for Green Jobs Oshawa was passed at a general membership meeting, but little was ever done in terms of tangible support by the local's executive (Interviews 9, 10, 11, 12, and 17). The campaign was also openly criticized by Unifor National leadership, including Dias, who characterized it as a totally unrealistic response to the problem, the work of “textbook socialists” who had plenty of good ideas but never achieved anything (Findlay 2020, 20:50; Interviews 9, 10, 14, and 17).
The idea of fighting to bring a closing plant under public ownership and worker control to build socially useful products as a solution to both plant closure and the climate crisis is not new, nor is it even unfamiliar within Unifor. In response to the closure announcement of the Brampton, Ontario Caterpillar plant in 1991, CAW locals in Mississauga and Brampton joined with Greenpeace and various other antipoverty and environmental activists and groups to form the Green Work Alliance (Keil 1994, 19–23; Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011, 20–21). The Alliance was tolerated by the CAW's national leadership and supported by the leadership of the CAW locals involved, but the same cannot be said for Green Jobs Oshawa, which was met with open antagonism from the national union. In the early 1990s, there was still an appetite for challenging the fundamentals of capitalism within the union that had clearly eroded by the 2000s as a consequence of the decline of the left inside the union and the loss of any sort of organized left opposition faction. In this way, the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign constitutes a counterhegemonic movement attempting to disrupt the established common sense inside the union. With respect to climate change, the campaign challenges the notion that a just transition for workers necessarily requires partnership and compromise between labour and capital. Instead, the campaign asserts that the scale of the climate crisis is such that the very fundamentals of the global economy need to be reconfigured from the bottom up. In that respect, the campaign also challenges a fundamental contradiction of unionism: that because the union owes its existence to the company or industry, the union must defend the interests of the company or industry. In recent years, and most clearly articulated during the 2008 bailout negotiations, the argument that the most important objective for the union is the success of the company has found increasing salience among the leadership of the union (Fairweather 2022, 387).
Green Jobs Oshawa also demonstrates the possibilities and the limitations of coalitions and symbolic politics. The campaign has been able to secure support from a wide variety of places, including various community organizations, other unions and union federations, and the provincial wing of the NDP. The campaign relies heavily on the work and support of people outside of Local 222, but within the local union, and most significantly, on the shop floor, the campaign has struggled to secure much in the way of support, let alone commitment. This leaves the campaign a very far cry from being able to leverage any structural forms of power in pursuit of its demands. Without the support of a sizable faction within the in-plant membership, the prospects for challenging the established common sense around plant closures and climate change alike are also limited. The work of coalition building is also contingent on an array of external factors, as campaigns come to rely on the involvement of activists and organizations who are spread thin. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Green New Deal Coalition hit a road block—one activist described how the various groups involved became “siloed” (Interview 14)—because of the need to practice physical distancing and the effect that had on their ability to put on in-person actions and events.
The Green Jobs Oshawa campaign also offers some important lessons about rank-and-file forms of internationalism. Rank-and-file internationalism is part of the reason the grassroots campaigns of 2016 and 2019 were so different. In 2016, GM Oshawa Matters focused heavily on the local community and the symbolic politics of nationalism to make its case. No efforts were made to build coalitions outside of Canada. In 2019, the situation was very different. By announcing the closure of plants in both Canada and the United States, GM signaled in very clear terms the international scale of the crisis autoworkers were confronting, and so the material conditions surrounding the plant closure were conducive to internationalism in a way they have seldom been in the past. As the global reorganization of production continues and the consequences of climate change become more clear and present in workers’ lives, the likelihood of this kind of organizing will only continue to grow. Katy Fox-Hodess's research on the European Dockworkers’ Council demonstrates that internationalism “from below” can be a source of renewed militancy and agility in union strategy, and it can help to foster a shared culture and sense of community (Fox-Hodess 2020, 105). In the case of Green Jobs Oshawa, rank-and-file internationalism also played a crucial role in inspiring new ways of framing familiar problems, and that shared culture and sense of community also provided a sense of confidence that working people can still make bold demands of employers, governments, and their own unions. Activists from different countries were able to share not only their very similar stories of struggle, but the variety of tactics and solutions. This is also familiar if forgotten terrain inside of the CAW. The Green Work Alliance of the early 1990s was also inspired by encounters with internationalism following a visit from a group of Japanese workers who brought with them the story of an eight-year-long occupation of a Toshiba plant that resulted in the formation of a workers’ cooperative (Keil 1994, 19; Hrynyshyn and Ross 2011, 21). However, unlike the Toshiba occupation, the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign involved no real threat of militancy. Instead of building the capacity and willingness of workers inside the plant to leverage their structural power in support of its demands, the campaign largely existed outside of the plant where it was easy to ignore or write off as unrealistic. This also meant that the internationalism on display resulted in few enduring links between workers in the Canadian and American plants, and so it remained very distant from the shop floor. Workers in different countries coming together around their shared struggle is a vitally important first step, but unless it can permeate and involve the wider membership inside the plants, internationalism “from below” remains just as distant and abstracted from the shop floor as the work of the Global Unions.
Epilogue: Assembly Returns to Oshawa
At the conclusion of the 2020 round of collective bargaining between Unifor and General Motors, it was announced that the assembly of vehicles would return to the Oshawa facility. The union was quick to take credit for having convinced the automaker to maintain a presence in the facility through its Save Oshawa GM campaign and grievance (Unifor 2020). The aftermarket auto parts operation was, after all, part of the settlement of the grievance, which also saw the union agreeing to suspend its campaign. This would seem to validate Unifor's approach of marshalling the institutional power of the grievance procedure and rallying the symbolic power of nationalism. To be sure, the aftermarket auto parts operation was a direct result of the campaign, and it maintained a presence in the plant from which to expand. On the other hand, the return of assembly came several years after the campaign was suspended and the grievance settled, in the midst of a global pandemic and at a time when GM may have been seeking to spread its operations somewhat to mitigate the risks associated with having to shut down plants due to Covid-19 outbreaks. For example, after initially shutting down all of its plants in Canada and the United States at the outset of the pandemic between March and May of 2020, GM came under pressure to again shut down facilities where there were Covid-19 cases, and in July of 2020, the automaker laid off 1,200 workers on the third shift at its Wentzville, Missouri truck plant in response to rising absenteeism related to the spread of the virus (Boudette 2020). In his own remarks following the announcement, Dias admitted that GM's decision was based at least in part on its need to quickly expand its truck production capacity due to shortages elsewhere in its network related to the pandemic (Noble and Hall 2020).
Critics, including organizers and supporters of Green Jobs Oshawa, have also pointed out that with most workers accepting buyouts and early retirement following the closure announcement, the plant would be reopened with a significantly cheaper workforce, in effect allowing GM to replace better paid senior workers with new hires (Gindin 2020; Leah and Keetch 2020). This reduced the cost of reopening the plant favourably for GM at the expense of the workers and the community. Overall, it is difficult to characterize the return of assembly to Oshawa as either a firm commitment for the future or a direct response solely to pressure from the union. Whatever effect the Save Oshawa GM campaign had in terms of pressuring the automaker to reverse course, it must be said that the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign also contributed to the pressure. The group behind it may not have had the resources to secure a Super Bowl ad, but the campaign did become the subject of a documentary, which also put General Motors’ actions under scrutiny. Peter Findlay's (2020) film, Company Town, aired across the country on Canada's national broadcaster, the CBC. Nevertheless, the national union's main goal in organizing the campaign was accomplished. The same certainly cannot be said for Green Jobs Oshawa, and this offers valuable lessons about the obstacles facing a more transformative labour environmentalism. The jobs that returned to Oshawa are still tied to the production of gas-powered pick-up trucks rather than electric vehicles, contributing to the further destruction of the climate in the short term, and subject to the “inevitable acceleration of environmental standards shortening the production life of these vehicles” (Gindin 2020) in the long term. These are also passenger automobiles that do nothing to challenge the culture of automobility that prohibits investments in more efficient and sustainable ways of transporting people. Meanwhile, the national union's opposition to the more transformational vision put forward by Green Jobs Oshawa undermined the campaign.
Conclusion
Responding to the dual challenges of climate change and globalization requires the kinds of rank-and-file internationalism and alternative economic vision on display in the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign. Understanding and appreciating both the campaign's failures and accomplishments is therefore important. The constant reorganization of production in search of greater profits puts unions everywhere on the defensive, encouraging them to prioritize protecting jobs at all costs over any other consideration. In that context, the orientation of the national union, which varied between apathy in favour of its own agenda and outright hostility, was in some ways the biggest obstacle for the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign. Grassroots union environmentalisms are therefore limited for precisely the same reason they are so important. They attack the capitalist myopia in which many traditional unions are, even for perfectly understandable reasons, complicit. At the same time, the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign unsettled the established common sense inside the union, if only for a brief moment. The campaign has sought to overcome the narrow, nationalist sentiment that grips so much of the rest of the union by emphasizing that “Global Solidarity Beats Global Greed.” Similarly, the campaign has put forward a green jobs agenda, emphasizing that the choice between good union jobs and a clean environment has always been a false one.
As the automaker announced its decision to shutter plants in both Canada and the United States, unionists in both countries were inspired to work together in struggle, and the demands and tactics of the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign were shaped in fundamental ways by this display of rank-and-file internationalism. The objective conditions of the ongoing reorganization of the North American auto industry under free trade thus help to explain why the 2019 campaign was such a marked departure from the 2016 campaign by many of the same Oshawa autoworkers. However, the subjective conditions inside the union are far more important in explaining those differences, as rank-and-file socialists, communists, and anarchists in both countries adopted an internationalist and environmentalist orientation promoting public ownership in response to the closure announcement, while the national union and members of the in-plant leadership doubled-down on the symbolic politics of nationalism and the scapegoating of Mexican autoworkers. The national union's campaign represents the continuation of a long trajectory away from militancy and direct action leveraging structural power and towards the politics of partnership and class collaboration in service of more institutional and coalitional forms of power. However, the Green Jobs Oshawa campaign was itself never in a position to tap into the militant potential on display in the aftermath of the announcement. While the organizers built many important and promising relationships outside the plant, they struggled to find much support among the in-plant membership. As a result, the campaign has struggled to legitimately assert its demand for worker control. Despite the significant differences in framing and objectives, the campaign's organizers pursued very similar tactics to earlier campaigns and to the approach undertaken by Unifor national. Winning more radical kinds of change requires a different set of tactics altogether. Green Jobs Oshawa never built the rank-and-file commitment required to wage the kind of protracted and militant direct action on display in the Toshiba occupation, for example. Instead, the organizing took place mostly outside of the plant in the arenas of coalition building and symbolic politics.
Despite the foregoing limitations, there are important and promising lessons to be gleaned from the campaign. It reinforces the importance of internationalism as an antidote to nationalism, and the role those relationships can play in generating new ideas, especially in times of crisis. It reinforces the importance of ideology and internal union politics in the making of union strategy and collective action. As unions continue to grapple with the enduring sense that demands for good jobs and for meaningful action on climate change are inherently at odds, Green Jobs Oshawa offers an important counter. Whether or not the union as a whole could one day embrace the campaign's more transformative vision remains to be seen. Doing so would require a return to the union's more radical roots. As the reorganization of the North American auto industry continues and the threat of climate catastrophe grows, the need for new strategies and cooperation across borders will also continue to grow.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my thanks to Stephanie Ross and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback. I would also like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose funding made this research possible.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 752-2018-1780).
