LAYING IT ON THE LINE Driving A Hard Bargain in Challenging Times
By Buzz Hargrove
Harper Collins, 316 pages, $32.99
***
As globalization has accelerated its pace and broadened its scope, workers the world over seem to find themselves in an increasingly precarious state.
There has been much chatter, over recent decades, about the general decline of unions and their diminishing influence in and relevance to the lives of Canadian workers. Fewer and fewer are dues-paying members.
In public discourse, to bash unions is de rigueur. They are everyone's favourite piñata, the source of myriad ills: enemies of productivity and progress; bureaucratic; anti-democratic; an intractable, greedy and anachronistic force.
During these last two years of the most profound economic crisis to confront the world since the 1930s, unions have come under increasing scrutiny. They are frequently upbraided by politicians and skewered in editorial pages, talk radio and on cable TV. They are accused of being mired in self-delusion, derided as pathologically obsessed with their sundry entitlements, portrayed as an inveterate threat to economic recovery.
In his intriguing new book, Laying it On the Line: Driving a Hard Bargain in Challenging Times, which is part memoir, part manifesto, part collective bargaining primer, part prescription for the crisis facing the auto sector, Basil Eldon "Buzz" Hargrove, the former national president of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) responds to the critics.
Hargrove's story begins in the New Brunswick "bush" in the 1940s. He is raised "in poverty and hopelessness" in a crowded house with no running water, electricity or central heating. The high-school dropout eventually leaves the Maritimes, ends up on a Chrysler assembly line in Windsor, and becomes active in the labour movement. The union becomes his finishing school, his salvation: "... I was elected shop steward. For the first time in my life I was responsible to someone beside myself, and almost overnight I changed from a hell-raising young guy spending his off-hours in beer halls and at the racetrack to a union advocate discussing left-wing politics and strategy."
There is a Horatio Alger aspect to this tale. Our protagonist, though, is clearly less an Ayn Rand "rugged individualist" and more a "man of the people" collectivist.
Hargrove is a passionate believer in the power of unions and thinks they are unfairly maligned by government and the "corporate controlled" media. He maintains that unions are a civilizing force that defend the rights of workers. They enable working people to gain "a voice and fair wages," but also engender pride, dignity and a sense of community in an atomized world.
In spite of a precipitous 10 per cent decline in union membership in Canada in the last 20 years, Hargrove argues that unionized workers remain more stable, better paid and far more productive than their non-unionized comrades. Unions, he insists, are good for women - they get paid more - and help produce a solid middle class, which is a bulwark of democracy.
He rails against what he considers a systematic assault on working people and organized labour, He blames the "axis of evil": deregulation, privatization and globalization.
He also lambastes former Ontario Conservative premier Mike Harris, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper for what he deems their fanatical fealty to free trade and market-based solutions. He holds their laissez-faire philosophy responsible for the evisceration of Canada's once robust manufacturing sector and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Hargrove, though, is an equal opportunity critic. He peels strips off left-wing figures such as Jack Layton, Bob Rae and Sid Ryan - calling them arrogant and politically naive - along with corporate types such as Lee Iacocca, Robert Milton and Telus's Darren Entwistle - who are egotistical and boorish.
He dismisses the label "union boss" as pejorative, arguing energetically for the CAW's democratic bona fides. He presents his union as a paragon of transparency and accountability. On this matter, it seems Hargrove, the master salesman, is trying too hard to convince us.
Hargrove attributes the decline of Canada's auto industry to the unfortunate demise of the Auto Pact, our high dollar and the lack of import restrictions. He advocates "managed trade," not "free trade, and the implementation of a comprehensive national auto policy. He rejects the charge that unionized workers and their "excessive wages" are to blame for the Big Three's woes, countering that they amount to a measly seven per cent of the total cost of a vehicle. Rather, he takes the auto companies themselves to task for poor management practices.
Laying It on the Line is replete with surprising anecdotes, including a bizarre expletive-filled meeting Hargrove had with Stephen Harper; the PM did the swearing, Hargrove surmises, to "suggest he was one of the boys."
And who knew an unreconstructed socialist could harbour such affection for two of Canada's most unapologetic capitalists, Onex Corp's Gerry Schwartz and Magna International's Frank Stronach.
Hargrove's admiration for Stronach seems particularly odd given the auto-parts magnate's anti-union posture. And as if things couldn't get stranger, Hargrove reveals that in 1990, a cash-strapped Stronach sought million in loans from the CAW's strike fund for his then struggling firm: In the end he got the money elsewhere.
Hargrove says he supported using the strike-fund money to help the non-union company because the deal would have allowed the CAW to organize Magna workers.
Laying It on the Line reveals Buzz Hargrove to be a shrewd negotiator and a pragmatist of the first order, an unconventional man undaunted at the prospect of befriending should-be foes and alienating would-be allies.
Adrian Harewood is a writer and radio/television broadcaster in Ottawa.