(The following article is from the March 16-31, 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 Sam Hammond

The Harper government has launched a new attack on the Canadian working class, aimed directly at the CAW. After a deadhead budget proposal that brought the country to a political crisis, a narrow escape hiding under the skirts of the Governor-General, a "just enough to appease the Liberals" limp into the parliamentary new year with a do‑nothing program, the Harperites have finally made a decisive move. That move is an insult to every working class person in this country.

     In a crisis where the perpetrators have been generously rewarded for their crimes, where not one banker or corporate CEO has been asked to return a single penny from billions in bonuses and stock options they gave themselves, where not one politician has been asked to curtail expenses, where the government has given itself a generous $3 Billion slush fund that doesn't have to be accounted for, they dare to demand that autoworkers and retirees return pension benefits, give back monetary items, freeze wages and cut health benefits.

     This attack will shrink the consumer spending of 10,000 auto workers, diminish the domestic market and spin‑off into decreased health benefits for 10,000 families and probably more pensioners. This is surely not a demand for the present, because it will escalate everything that brought us into this crisis. No! This is a demand for the near and distant future, for the neo‑con dream of a fettered and compliant working class, either bereft of unions or possessing unions that have been forced into the role of junior partners in the drive to maintain and nurture the status quo.

     The opening shot is against the proud CAW at General Motors. Ford hasn't asked for a bailout, but for sure they will want contract parity with GM. What will the CAW do? Chrysler waits in the wings with an empty pail extended, another set of concessions?

     This all takes place without a defined benefit from government. The demand is made and the concessions offered before any evidence of reward, before any knowledge of an outcome. This is not bargaining, it is something else, and the implications for Canadian Labour are enormous in scope and deadly in content.

     Remember that in the midst of this debacle, under the cover of saving an industry and jobs, GM is investing tens of millions of dollars in Brazil to build state of the art production facilities. Ford already has the most technologically advanced assembly plant in the world operating in Brazil.

     If the CAW agrees to take concessions to produce cheaper than US workers, what will it do to produce cheaper than Brazilian workers when the dial moves? This is not solidarity; it is competition, the enemy of workers that seeks to put us into antagonistic relations in a race to the bottom for the sustenance of corporate greed. The antithesis of competition is solidarity and unity, the historical foundation of trade unionism.

     On March 10 and 11, as this newspaper goes to press, 10,000 auto workers will vote on the concessions. Those most vulnerable, the pensioners, will get no vote. Those who deferred their wages into pensions and benefits through tough bargaining and strikes will get no vote. Those who built the CAW will get no vote. But even if these 10,000 active workers turn down the concessions, (unlikely in the absence of a back‑up plan), the problem remains.  What is to be done to restore the Canadian manufacturing base?

     If it wants to survive as an independent force representing the class interests of working people, the labour movement needs to come up with a program of reconstruction that all people can fight for. Then battered autoworkers can really have a choice, can reject concessions for the "labour alternative." That alternative must include the nationalization of resources to be used for the building of a repossessed, publicly-owned manufacturing base. The first step in building that Labour Alternative could be rejection of concessions and a definite "no" to the Harperite agenda.