Hostage To Negotiations

Last month, locked-out Electro-Motive Diesel employees and CAW members blockaded a Caterpillar locomotive in Ingersoll, Ont. EMD employees were locked out by Caterpillar after they refused to accept a new contract and an average 50-per-cent pay cut. Now Caterpillar is shutting down EMD.

Southern Ontario has been hit quite hard with job losses and rising unemployment. With the direction in which factory production and employment has been heading of late all over Ontario it doesn't look as though there will be a working solution any time soon. And it's likely that powerful unions with their non-compromise attitudes may have something to do with the slow and steady disappearance of production and jobs.

The muscular and confrontational Canadian Auto Workers behave, during walk-outs and strikes, like thugs, insisting on their right to threaten and coerce people desperate for work who will willingly albeit with some inner quailing, take their jobs on a temporary basis while employers attempt to continue production during wild-cat walk-outs. Co-operation, sitting down to bargain with some leeway and give doesn't seem to loom large on big unions' agendas.

It doesn't seem all that long ago that the public was being treated to news stories about a new day dawning, where unions and corporate interests were interested in forging a new alliance, a more temperate attitude on the part of both for the greater good of society, to reach agreements on work/union contracts that might satisfy both the employers and the employed. It may be that in some instances this new paradigm has been successful.

But not, it appears, in heavy industry. And the multinational U.S.-based Caterpillar Corp. is the heaviest of heavy industry, representing the largest most powerful heavy industry manufacturer in the Western Hemisphere. There was a time when it was gasping under the influence of a lack of proceeds, but that time is not now. It is making huge annual profits, as it must, to remain competitive and in business.

And it clearly isn't too interested in giving away the shop. Which, to the big lights at Caterpillar means why pay a factory worker a $38-an-hour wage with full additional benefits under an unsustainable union contract in Ontario, even with the benefits to the company of universal health care for its employees, which doesn't have to dredge deep into company profits, when they can use their under-utilized factories in the United States?

It is in the U.S. right now where unemployment is huge, far more so even than jobs-absent Ontario. It is there, where people can be easily persuaded to work for far less than fat-cat, union-led Ontarians. In Muncie, Indiana, the newly-opened Caterpillar plant held a well-attended job fair recently. Indiana has become one of those U.S. states that has declared itself, through legislation, as a "right to work" state. No worker can be coerced to join a union.

So, was the company warning to Caterpillar workers in Ontario that the company was dissatisfied with its profit dividends to the extent that they would offer new wages coming in at up to a 50% discount on current wages serious? Or just a lead-in to their assurance that the shocker would lead to refusal, and the response of closure justified?

Did the union shut the door on negotiations rather than humbly accept the company's demands prematurely? Would they not have been in receipt of intelligence that with a new plant in a state that eschews union activity, with people eager to take a job, any job at any wage, they were courting a full shut-down? Even so, would it not have been in the best interests of the workers to sit down and use the company offer as a starting point to bargain for better?

Did union management weigh that against the insultingly humble backtracking on union-bargained wages, one they might never be able to live down? Gambling that the loss of a mere 450 jobs in London could be tolerated, and it wasn't their fault anyway, because Caterpillar has no moral conscience...?