Lifestyles of the working class

The Teamsters Union master agreements of the late 50s raised the bar for industrial unions like the UAW and the Steelworkers. By the mid-60s the unionized working class had created the middle class.

Before the WWII, being "middle class" meant you had hired help in the house.

By 1970, being middle class meant you had a house in the burbs and two cars and your kids were going to post-secondary, all on the strength of your grade 9 education and your job at US Steel or General Motors.

It was always hilarious to me how the social scientists created the white-collar/blue-collar paradigm, wherein white-collar workers were placed higher in the social hierarchy than the grunts. The reason Oakville Ontario was the highest income postal code in Canada for decades wasn't because of doctors and lawyers and successful entrepreneurs, but because of the Ford assembly plant.

The post-war working class was where most post-war immigrants landed. In the fifties, they mostly came from a Europe that had been decimated by the war. Within three years of getting off the boat at Pier 21, we owned a house. 

Contrast that to the lot of working class immigrants arriving here today. 

It's been a while since we got any from Europe. (Although circumstances in Ukraine could change that.) Instead, they're coming from what we euphemistically refer to as "less-developed" countries. Those are the countries devastated by the legacy of colonialism and the various wars we have inflicted on them, always for their own good, of course.

And guess what? All those quality union jobs that used to await immigrants?

Why, they've all been sent to Mexico or China or elsewhere overseas!

After all, why pay an immigrant thirty bucks an hour to build a GM pickup in Oshawa, when you can just move the entire assembly plant to Mexico, and potential immigrants can stay home and build the same truck for two bucks an hour?

The jobs left for working class immigrants no longer allow the standard of living afforded the immigrants of past generations.

Today, Pier 21 is just a museum.

Today, working class immigrants have a wide range of minimum wage jobs available to them, none of which will provide a living wage, let alone the prospect of achieving financial security.

Unfortunately, they'll never own a home or a car, will never accumulate inter-generational wealth, and are doomed to live a hand-to-mouth existence that the social scientists label "lifestyles of the working poor." 

But don't worry...

Experts at the most prestigious schools have been awarded generous grants to study the matter.

More anti-union, anti-worker propaganda

Check out this report from Fox News about the UAW strike at GM. It tells us flat out that GM workers make $63/hr in pay and benefits.

Fake news?

In fact, the highest earning shop floor folks make about half that. That's the old guard, people who have been there fifteen years or more. After the UAW allowed the two-tier contracts to come in, anyone hired since makes substantially less.

GM comes up with this number by throwing the expenses of almost half a million retirees into their labour costs! That's totally bogus, but the media who report this stuff want you to think that there's greedy UAW members who make well over $100,000 a year, striking for more!

Is that because the billionaires who own the media want to stir you up against unions?

RIP Bob White

Bob White was the most important union leader in Canada the last quarter of the 20th century. He even got a respectful shout-out from the arch-capitalist Globe and Mail on his passing.

Alas, Bob's work is a work in progress. I mean no disrespect to the guys who have followed Bob at CAW and CLC and Unifor, but in Bob's day the weasels at Lear would have seen Bob himself on the picket line and the Lear story would have been on the front page, not buried in the business section.

I was at various times a member of both the UAW and the CAW. I have to say taking the Canadians out of the UAW was a ballsy move at the time. But was it the right move? I'm not sure.

If labour is to have any heft in this age of globalization, it pretty much demands international unions. Otherwise we're just going to see the downward spiral continue.

After all, why should the capitalists who own Lear give a shit whether their workers make $52 per hour or $30 per hour, when they can just move the entire plant to Mexico where workers are delighted to make $2 per hour?

That's the magic of "free trade."

Whatever happened to militant unions?

There's yet another story out there concerning Canadians being sent home so foreign workers can take their jobs for less money.

Reading between the lines, it sounds to me that the sum total of what the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Ironworkers intends to do about it is bleat to the media about their tough luck.

That's it.

When you have a union leadership that gutless, it's no wonder international labour brokers are cutting their grass. Back in the day, had an employer even dreamt of forcing union ironworkers off the job in favour of foreign scabs, the jobsite would have been shut down immediately. Union leaders were willing to go to jail. Rank and file were willing to go to jail. Their jobs were something they and their fathers and grandfathers before them had fought hard to make into a well-paying blue-collar profession.

I cannot for a moment imagine such a scenario playing out in Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters or Walter Reuther's UAW or even Bob White's CAW.

Look at the CAW today; when Caterpillar closed the London Electromotive plant, the union's response was to help their members fill out their EI applications.

We need a new generation of old-school labour leaders, men and women who know what they stand for and aren't going to buckle even in the face of prospective jail time.

The shit-bags and weasels who are conniving with the Harper government to flood the country with low-paid non-union labour are having a field day because nobody on the other side is willing to take a stand.

Those sixty workers sent home last week have the power to shut Kearl down. But they won't do it by going home with their tails between their legs, and they need the support of their union.

The guns of October

Spent a little time on the porch this afternoon with a little conversation and a few pints. Every couple minutes there'd be a volley of shotgun blasts coming from the marsh across the way. Hunting season.

Hunting is still part of the social fabric in these parts. Families hunt together. Moms take their sons (and their daughters) hunting while the menfolk go off on their own hunting trips. When a young lad gets to go on the hunt with Dad instead of Mom he knows he's a man. Or damned close to it.

My first teaching gig was in the southerly reaches of the next county. Hillbilly country. The folks over there would probably take that as a compliment.

It was a rough kind of crowd. Wasn't unusual to find twenty year olds in my grade ten metal shop. Not that they were stupid; they just had other priorities besides school.

Then again, some of them were kinda dicey. Not stupid, but dicey. You know; the kind of teenager who has a social work team and a legal team and a probation officer. And four high school credits after five years of high school.

One day in October I get to class, and there's nobody there. Well, not quite nobody. Coupla geeky dorkshits who typically show up even on so-called "professional development" days. And snow days.

The brightest kids in the class.

The only kids without criminal records.

Where the fuck is everybody?

Hunting season sir!

Yup, early in my career I still heard the "sir" word!

Not sure if the demise of that custom is a good thing or a bad thing. Bit of both perhaps.

What was instructive about that moment for me, my own personal "teachable moment" as it were, was that obviously the entire regimen of gun registration and hunter licensing was geared to making sure that even the most marginally literate and consummately stupid teens were capable of passing whatever test was legally required to be able to go hunting.

Whatever the do-gooders had in mind when they legislated all that "gun control", none of it precluded the dumbest of the dumb in the next county from exercising their right to go hunting in October.

Not sure if that's a good thing or not.

Bought a used car in the southerly reaches of that county this week. A mostly rust free Accord that we picked up for the equivalent of three payments on a brand new one. Has a few miles on it, but the Farm Manager did some research on the net and found lots of testimonials from folks who ran their Accords to four or five hundred thousand miles.

I've personally owned two vehicles that made it well past the 400 thousand mark. One was a Volkswagen diesel and the other was a Subaru. I've had others that passed 300; another Subaru and a Toyota.

I've owned about three dozen vehicles in my time and oddly enough all the high-milers were Japanese or German. Not that American vehicles can't do that, but it is just so highly unlikely.

For example, the GM van that this Accord is replacing has the 3.8 v-6 that by all accounts is good for half a million miles. That was a motor that was always highly rated by the folks who rate that kind of thing. The GM 3.8 v-6 was right up there among the most reliable engines in the world, going right back to the 80's. I recall that my dear daddy had a couple different Buicks with the 3.8, and sure enough, that v-6 was starting up every day long after the air quit, the sunroof started leaking, the power windows didn't work anymore and the body had more holes than a round of Swiss cheese.

So the engine is good for half a million. What good is a motor that can go half a million miles if the rest of the vehicle has rotted to hell in half that?

That's the thing with American technology. It's not that America can't build good stuff, it's that they choose not to. After the great bail-out fraud of 09, where GM was allowed to shed it's contract obligations to its workers, the only thing that has changed is that workers in Honda and Toyota plants in North America suddenly find themselves making more than the workers in the UAW plants of the Big Three.

But they're still building better cars.

Working class

"I've never... dealt with such an unethical, immoral, disrespectful, highly profitable company like Caterpillar."

That was CAW chief Ken Lewenza when Caterpillar was busy turning $30/hr. jobs in London Ontario into $15/hr. jobs in one of the "right-to-work-for-less" states.

And what happened then?

Nothing.

Ken did the best he could to salvage whatever severance crumbs he could from the situation. The overall Caterpillar strategy of playing workers in one jurisdiction off against those in another was never remotely challenged.

Why not?

Workers in China have made huge gains in recent years. They have made such gains that within a few years Chinese wages will catch up to North American wages.

Why?

Because workers in China are not averse to tossing a factory manager from the plant roof from time to time just to let the management side know that they're serious.

Now I'm certainly not suggesting that we need to toss managers from the factory roof, but where all of the unions in North America have failed is in letting the other side know that they're serious. Back in the day, folks like Reuther and Hoffa were willing to go to jail.

That can happen when you're willing to assert yourself.

That can happen when you're prepared to say "no thanks, we're not ready to settle for crumbs."

A large part of the problem originates in the rank and file. I remember when I worked at Budd Automotive, where I was hired on my 18th birthday, guys would show up in dress shirts and blazers because they didn't want their neighbours to know they worked in a factory.

These were generally the same guys who, once they'd worked there a few months, would conclude that the union was holding them back.

Yup! They were slamming blanks into a press and pulling them out for five bucks an hour when the minimum wage was $1.50. The training for their job took about five minutes. But they hated the fact that they had union dues deducted from their pay!

There's still an awful lot of that going on. Well into the 1960's Newfoundland was happy to employ grade eight graduates to teach the grade one class. Now you need two university degrees to teach a grade one class. And you'll find teachers who truly believe that without their teacher union they could do better for themselves!

Yes! The government will happily double your salary if it wasn't for that damned union!

The truth of the matter is that there is no teaching job anywhere in North America that couldn't be done and done well by some eager recent graduate who is working at the mall for minimum wage and would see a $30 thousand annual salary with benefits as the pot 'o gold at the end of their rainbow.

Once we're in a mindset that accepts the logic of moving a job or replacing a worker just because somebody is willing to do that job for less, we're screwed.

And it is on this point that organized labour has failed us.

Volkswagen workers win 5.6% raise

That would be the Volkswagen workers in Germany, not the ones in Chattanooga.

The German workers get this raise on top  of their current $60/hour rate. Workers in Chattanooga start at $14/hr. and can work their way up to $20.

They all build Volkswagens, so why does the company pay its US workers a third of what they pay their German workers?

In Germany the workers belong to unions. Their unions have seats on corporate boards.

In America they don't.

We're losing the race to the bottom

Don't take it personally; everybody loses in the race to the bottom.

I'm old enough to remember the debate about how much the various levels of government should be prepared to subsidize the proposed Cambridge Toyota plant thirty years ago. Toyota made it clear that they were playing off one jurisdiction against another.

Why should they build their factory in Ontario in return for 50 million in subsidies if Kentucky was offering 100 million and so on.

This has become the norm in the car industry. Why build here if they're going to give us more free money over there? It's the strategy that got Alabama a Mercedes plant. It's the strategy that got anybody any car plant anywhere in the last thirty years.

Originally different communities were prepared to offer those subsidies because of what they got in return; long-term, stable, well-paying jobs.

That has slowly been changing, and the pace of that change will only speed up in the future. Today the car companies want those billion dollar subsidies in return for providing fewer, less stable, mediocre-paying jobs. In a few years they will demand even greater subsidies in return for shit jobs.

We're well on our way.

One of the arguments put forward by Canadian officials is that companies will continue to see Canada as a desirable location because of our well educated work-force. This is a conceit unique to those who have never worked in a car assembly plant. Face it; as anybody who has ever walked that mile will readily attest, you don't have to be particularly bright or particularly well-educated to nail that gig.

Here's a telling quote from Professor Tony Faria, of the Odette Business School at the University of Windsor; " We like to talk about a skilled, educated workforce in Canada... the US workforce is equally as skilled and educated... the Mexican workforce is equal to that in the US."

So where does that leave Canadian autoworkers?

The going wage for assembly line workers in Mexican plants owned by the big three is $3.75 an hour.

Where do you think that leaves Canadian autoworkers?

Michigan workers take it dry

Governor Rick Snyder took Michigan down the "right to work for less" road today. It's for the good of the workers of course. Why should they forever be held back by those union bosses who skim off their union dues and use them to support... an entire snake nest of liberal issues only favored by Democrats?

"Right to Work" is a cynically Orwellian misnomer of course. Right to Work legislation is everywhere recognized as the draconian anti-worker initiative that it is. Now that it has found a home in Michigan, look for it to rear its head across the Detroit River, where wannabe Tory Premier-in-waiting Tim Hudak has already been making noises about how unions are too powerful etc.

The truth of the matter is that unions are weaker in the North American economy today than at any time in the past 75 years. What we need is a new generation of union leaders who are willing to face down the politicians who are doing the bosses bidding. We need more Jimmie Hoffas and Walter Reuthers and CS Jacksons and Bob Whites.

Maybe we need to roll back the clock a bit further and pick up where the "Wobblies" left off. One union for all working people. After all, everybody from the clerk at the 7-11 to the most sophisticated technician in the aerospace industry deserves to make a living wage. It doesn't need to be the same wage, obviously, but even the weakest and least-skilled among us deserves to live with dignity.

How the weakest among us fare out will be the criteria by which our society is judged.

I think Jesus said that.

Mitt Romney has a plan to help the US auto industry

He does?

Mitt is a guy who is intimately acquainted with the concept of shipping American jobs to China, so this "Chinese Jeeps" gambit should be a non-starter to say the least.

And Lee Iaccoca knows all about auto industry bailouts, so to see him waxing wise in favor of anti-bailout Romney seems proof enough that old Lee might be a little further down the Alzheimer Highway than we suspected.

I made a small fortune betting on Chrysler shares around the time Lee got that bail-out. Unfortunately my next few bets went south. That wasn't his fault though, and I've had a soft spot in my heart for him ever since.

So to see him endorse Mitt stings a bit.

As for Chrysler, their quarterly results released today show an 80% jump in profit.

And as much as I might not like the two-tiered wage structure or a lot of the other stuff my former union has swallowed, it's better than nothing, which is what Chrysler would be, twice over, without government bailouts.

GM posts all-time record profits

Well glory be!

From death throes to record profits in less time than a supercharged Cadillac can cover the quarter mile!

The politicians are falling over themselves to take credit for the resurrection. W claims it was his idea. Nothing doing, Obama says.

It's a beautiful story though. Shows what 80 billion in Tarp loans can do for an American industry better known for having tens of thousands of vice-presidents than for its products.

At least they had products. I think what really rankled the car companies was seeing all those bail-out billions being handed out to the too-big-to-fail banksters.

Like, what the hell do they do? At least we make cars. I think. Somewhere. Hang on, let me check with my administrative assistant.

Yup! We make cars, dammit, and we employ millions of proud American workers and... what's that?.. not millions?... OK, we still employ a few hundred thousand proud Americans, so where's OUR bail out bonanza?

Alright already, patriotic American car companies, step right up and let Uncle Sam have a lookie into those books!

Hmmm... cause for concern. Tell you what. Seems you've been playing Santa to those UAW guys. Here's the plan.

Cut wages in half. After the last thirty years of driving them into the ground, there's lots and lots of folks happy to work for jobs that pay like it's 1976.

Cut those union pensioners off their health care benefits altogether. Let's get serious. What are they doing for you these days? These tough times are no place for sentimentality. Besides, they're sick and old. They'll be long-gone well before any class actions make it to court.

You do that, and Uncle Sam will cut you a big fat Tarp check, alrighty!

And now that profitability has returned with a vengeance, can six-figure bonuses for all those vice-presidents be far behind?

Brilliant bosses give themselves 300% raises while demanding 50% pay cut from stupid workers

GM Diesel in London used to be considered a good gig. Had an interview there once. Didn't hear back. Four months later when they called me in for my physical I was busy with something else.

That was somewhere in the early nineties. GM Diesel was a General Motors sideline that didn't get a lot of attention from the hundreds of vice-presidents at head office. They were too busy brain-storming up crap like the Pontiac Aztec to sweat a little locomotive sideline.

In 2005 GM got out of the locomotive business. They had wanted to sell to Caterpillar but the deal was vetoed by the unions, the UAW and the CAW. So they sold to a couple of hedge funds instead.

Five years later the hedge fund boys doubled their money by selling to, guess who, Caterpillar! If you're a suit at Greenbriar or Berkshire Partners, you don't give a shit what the union fellows think. It's not like you're going to need their cooperation tomorrow.

Now that Caterpillar is in the driver's seat the fun has begun. They've locked out that London plant. Want the CAW lads to take a 50% wage cut. The UAW guys at their new locomotive plant in Indiana have already settled for the lower wage structure. The message is simple. You can keep your job at half pay, or you can have no job; we can easily build this stuff in Indiana.

Caterpillar also has facilities in Mexico. When the next contract comes up in Indiana, you can guess what the simple message will be that Caterpillar has for the Indiana workers.

It's called the NAFTA effect.

Meanwhile, the suits at head office are doing very nicely for themselves. Doug Oberhelman took over the CEO office and had his pay quadruple to over 10 million. The outgoing top dog, Jim Owens, tripled his final year compensation as a way of thanking himself for his many years of visionary leadership. He took home over 20 million last year.

That too is called the NAFTA effect.

Squirrel hunting

Got hired at Budd Automotive on my eighteenth birthday. It was a UAW shop. Union rules. I'd been a dues-paying member of the USWA for awhile before that, when I worked at the Black Lung Foundry. The Steelworkers didn't mind having sixteen year olds on the roster. At the UAW shops you had to be 18. That was quite a few years before Bob White took the Canadian autoworkers out of the UAW and started the CAW.

Budd was the biggest employer in the Kitchener area at the time. Paid good too. Made car and truck frames for all the major manufacturers. Budd is long gone now. Either cars and trucks don't have frames anymore or the work went somewhere else. I'm guessing Mexico, but that's just a hunch.

Got my first lay-off notice just a few months after I started. Helpful Herb offered to let me stay at his place. He was heading off on a holiday. Needed a house-sitter. Herb had a nice place nestled on the crest of a hill on the edge of town. House sitting there was going to be a sweet gig.

That was an era when you couldn't open a paper without reading about racial tension and racial this and that. The Detroit riots and the Watts riots were a pretty recent memory. All I can tell you is this; when the black brothers and the white brothers and even a few Chinese brothers walked out of Budd with their lay-off notices, we were all brothers in unemployment.

Herb and Mrs. Herb were off to Europe or the Caribean or someplace. All I had to do was water the plants and keep the squirrels out of the bird feeder. I know! There's a gift from heaven just when you get a lay-off notice.

The deal with the squirrels was that they ate all the bird food and if they got a chance they'd eat the birds too. So Helpful Herb left me the keys to his gun cabinet and I went at it. Must have plinked off half a dozen the first day.

Bob White was probably the greatest union leader since C.S.Jackson. No nonsense guy. When Bob was negotiating for the UAW, or later the CAW, nobody ever made the mistake of thinking that the bosses and the workers were going to be sitting around the campfire singing Kum-by-ya together anytime soon.

So I dispatch the first round of feeder-raiding squirrels, and I realize that other squirrels, just waiting in the shadows, come zooming in to take their place. I take care of them, and there's another wave. And another.

The first act of working class resistance that I personally witnessed, I witnessed at Budd Automotive. There were eight welders working at an assembly station, two at each corner of a frame. The bumboys, unskilled labourers like me, would slap the frame parts in the jig, automated clamps would grab everything and hold it together, and these welders would weld it all up.

The automated clamps were all run off hydraulics. At each clamping cycle, which lasted about thirty seconds, one of the welders would stick the end of his mig gun into a hydraulic hose. Next cycle, the guy beside him would do the same. Enough cycles, and eventually the hydraulic hose would spring a leak and the station would be down for an hour or two. Eight welders, be they black or white or Chinese, would get a two hour break. It was a beautiful thing.

So eventually I got the squirrel problem winnowed down to one super-smart squirrel. Darwin's theory in action. But this guy is good. If you miss him on the first shot he's running zig-zag patterns to avoid the next shot. I swear he turns around and gives me the finger while he's zig-zagging away.

So I figure fuck Darwin, I'm gonna kill the furry fuck. I climb up on the roof, where I've got a downward shot at the birdfeeder. I'm peering through the scope, waiting for him to put his head up, and he's moments away from going to that big birdfeeder in the sky. Then, HOLYSHIT!!! A cross-country skier comes a-gliding through my field of vision! Then another one. And another...

Just lucky I had the scope. Without it I wouldn't have even seen the skiers! Can you imagine the newspaper headlines the next day? CARELESS HUNTER BAGS CROSS-COUNTRY SKIERS. Ya right. As if that woulda been my fault.

I eventually got the fucker with the twelve gauge, but I had to buy Herb a new bird-feeder.