Canadian Autoworkers: In the United States, about 9,200 members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union have affected two GM assembly plants and 18 parts distribution centers. GM also has furloughed about 2,300 U.S. workers due to the impact of the UAW strike.
Cassidy’s oppositional posturing is aimed at suppressing, not leading a rank-and-file rebellion against the pro-company Unifor apparatus of which he himself is a longstanding member.
Payne is a creature of the same bureaucratic layer as the disgraced and defrocked Jerry Dias. For Payne, like her predecessor as Unifor president, the suppression of workers’ struggles to safeguard the profitability of the employers is “job number one.”
Canadian autoworkers ratified a new labor agreement with Ford Motor Co. on Sunday, averting a threatened strike and potentially setting a precedent that could play out in the United Auto Workers' strike at automaker facilities in the U.S. The new agreement raises base hourly pay for production workers by almost 20% over three years, and by more than 25% for trade workers, the Canadian autoworker union Unifor said. Ford described the pact as a 15% wage increase over the three year life of the agreement.
As the WSWS presciently warned at the time, the founding of Unifor was a “bureaucratic maneuver” aimed at suppressing the class struggle. A decade on, this warning has been more than confirmed.