(The following article is from the March 1-15, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By Liz Rowley

Disastrous news in the auto industry has left autoworkers scared and confused as they fear for their jobs, their living standards and their future.

     Massive layoffs and plant closures and the threat of more to come, wage and benefit cuts, evaporating pensions, and the highest trade deficit (far more imports than exports), threaten not only the 40,000 Ontario workers employed directly by the auto companies, but also everyone who has one of the 7.5 indirect and spin-off jobs dependent on the auto assembly jobs.

     Auto is the engine of the Canadian economy, the heart of the manufacturing sector. What happens with auto will have an enormous impact on what happens to Ontario in particular.

     To the push for concessions, the CAW has linked its response to its demand for a national strategy on auto by the federal and provincial governments. Part of that strategy, says the CAW, should be government support for a North American auto pact.

     The Canada-US auto pact that guaranteed Canadian jobs for almost 40 years was signed in 1962. It provided the US automakers with access to the Canadian market in exchange for guaranteed assembly jobs and plants in Canada. Autoworkers here made cars, trucks and vans for Canadians and even more for export. For these workers, who were guaranteed permanent, high paid and unionized jobs, the Auto Pact did the trick. Whether the plants were Canadian or US-owned seemed immaterial to most workers.

     But in 2001, the World Trade Organization struck down the Auto Pact as an unfair trade barrier. Unfair, that is, to other foreign automakers who wanted unfettered access to the Canadian and North American market, free of encumbrances such as job and investment guarantees. US automakers, who had enjoyed a monopoly on the Canadian market, suddenly had competition from Asian and European carmakers with better products, and in Canada at least, union-free workplaces. US car plants started moving south. Since 2003, over 300,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, many of them in auto or related sectors.

     Now the economic recession and credit crisis are thinning out the auto companies, and workers are being asked to bailout the hardiest with wage cuts, job cuts, and cuts to pensions and benefits. According to the federal government, bailing out the survivors, with conditions, is the way to protect auto jobs and the auto industry.

     The CAW has come up with a proposal for a new North American auto pact that would protect the North American jobs of the Big Three automakers from Asian and European competitors. They advocate this as a way to protect Canadian jobs.

     But the original auto pact was a stop-gap, a band-aid that worked for a time before being wiped out by free trade and the global reach of the transnational corporations.

     Workers' interests briefly coincided with the interests of the US carmakers, to produce cars in Canada, but not for long, and not for much. A more lasting solution then, and now, was for a Canadian car industry, not private, but publicly-owned and controlled.

     The bail-outs should be rejected in favour of nationalization under public democratic control, and the production of a Canadian car that's small, affordable, fuel-efficient, and environmentally sustainable. 

     This one step would set the stage for a transportation policy that would involve the building of a mass public transit industry in Canada, including light rail for urban and inter-city transit, a machine tool-industry, ship-building, and more.

     We need a different approach today. Our approach to the auto industry should signify what kind of overall strategy Canada really needs, and what will benefit workers today and tomorrow.

     - Liz Rowley is the leader of Communist Party (Ontario).