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The Buzz about Buzz

Labour's controversial champion steps down and speaks up
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By Craig Saunders

www.saunderseditor.com

Working on the Canadian political left is like walking a minefield. It's almost impossible to rise to a position of authority without making enemies within the ranks. Every NDP premier knows this, as do most veteran activists. But few march straight into that minefield with the gusto of Buzz Hargrove.

Hargrove formally stepped down as president of the Canadian Auto Workers union at the beginning of September, 44 years after he stepped onto the assembly line at the Chrysler plant in Windsor, Ont. His career is one of the most controversial in Canadian labour history. Not only is Hargrove a scrappy and strategic negotiator, he's also a fiery personality who doesn't normally mince words, and who possesses a legendary temper.

Depending on whom you ask, Hargrove is either a great leader who has carried his union through the greatest challenges in its history, or a self-serving turncoat. To some, he’s a bit of both.

“We’ve changed the face of the union. I leave it, I think, the most open, progressive, democratic union that I’ve experienced around the world," he says.

During his tenure, the union has established caucuses for gays, lesbians and transgendered people, hired people of various sexual orientations in its upper ranks, and required that women be represented on the board. Those are changes Hargrove is proud of, as is the union’s increased com-mitment to social projects. Today, the union leadership meets three times a year, each time doling out up to $500,000 to social projects ranging from shelters to anti-poverty movements, international development, disaster relief and housing.

Hargrove’s been at the forefront of major changes — the CAW's split from the United Auto Workers being paramount among them. Changes to the union's constitution and the way it negotiates have meant that the CAW has merged with more than 30 unions and more than doubled its membership to 255,000 during Hargrove’s reign. Unquestionably, it’s an impressive legacy.

But it’s one that’s come at a cost, both personally and politically. Hargrove’s angered many former allies, including the NDP, the UAW and other unions. And many former friends have become critical of his tactics.

Hargrove’s tough demeanour comes naturally. He’s a high school dropout from Cape Breton, one of 10 children and, from the age of 10, the child of a single parent. His first job was picking potatoes for 50 cents an hour. After drifting around Western Canada for a few years looking for a better way to make a living, he took the advice of a brother who was working at the Chrysler plant in Windsor. He was 20 when he started work at the plant and joined local 444.

Joining that plant was a fateful decision — 444 isn’t just any local. Its first president was gunned down by an angry worker. In the 1980s it was led by Ken Gerard, a leader in the anti-concession movement and chair of the Canadian UAW Council. Gerard was a mentor to Hargrove, who himself has passed the torch to another 444 member, Ken Lewenza.

Hargrove has seen the union through huge changes. He started at Chrysler in 1964 when times were good. In the 1960s, North America was still an industrial economy, and the Great Lakes Basin was its heartland. But that shiny dream began to rust: factories began to close and move to the U.S. south, where labour was cheaper; Detroit, the Motor City, once a bastion of progress, became an internationally recognized symbol of despair and the failure of the American Dream.

“For me, it's been an incredibly interesting timeframe,” says Hargrove, sitting in a CAW boardroom north of Toronto. In an interview just days before he left office, he’s in characteristically casual garb — blue jeans, red golf shirt, and a nice gold watch. After months of sometimes acrimonious politicking within his union, he’s finally ready to step down, secure in the knowledge that his chosen successor, Ken Lewenza, will be elected as the union’s next president.

“I’ve been in a leadership position at some level in the union starting with my local in 1965, and I’ve been able to be part of so many changes in the labour movement and the political arena, and with social movements.” Those episodes include the waffle with the NDP, opposing wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and more.

“So it’s massive change, but you know, when I look at it, I read some of the old material... not much has changed. There are different names, a different timeframe, but the fight for world peace is even greater today, it’s just different countries. We’ve always had to fight right-wing movements — although we do have, I believe, one of the most right-wing prime ministers in the history of our country.”

That concern, that the powerfully ideological right-wing movement of Stephen Harper is one of the greatest threats Canada has faced, led Hargrove to deploy every weapon at his disposal to stop the right-wing rise. Some of his tactics enraged former allies on the left, most noticeably NDP activists who were outraged when Hargrove suggested voting Liberal might be a better idea, at least in ridings where the NDP hasn’t had a real shot at winning a seat.

Relationships between the party and the union have been souring since the 1990s, when Hargrove had a war of words with then Ontario Premier Bob Rae over the premier’s controversial economic plan, which included giving public-sector employees unpaid time off. Rae had hoped to forge a “social contract” with workers in order to tackle a deficit that threatened to hit $17 billion during a recession.

As the debate raged on in 1992, Hargrove prepared a bombastic speech to deliver to his members. Bob Rae was sent a copy. The speech didn’t exactly give the premier the support he would have liked.

“I blew my stack, and let fly a string of four-letter words, not realizing that my nine-year-old daughter Lisa was listening in the next room,” Rae wrote in his 1997 autobiography, From Protest to Power , adding “nothing heard in the schoolyard could compare with that kitchen tirade.”

(Rae declined an interview for this article, but his spokesperson said that Rae stands behind all his previous comments regarding Hargrove.)

Hargrove and Rae disagreed about the social contract from day one. And, as the premier dug in his heels, so did many of his traditional allies in labour. “I'm a socialist and really, I believe in using government as a tool for economic and social change,” Hargrove says. But the fight with Rae did more than just put allies on opposite sides of a debate — it opened a rift that has since only widened.

In the most publicly controversial move of his career, Hargrove began urging people to “vote strategically” in 1999 in order to keep Mike Harris out of power in Ontario. That is: vote Liberal if the NDP candidate didn’t look likely to win. The CAW president had embraced a Liberal tactic, and the NDP was outraged. Keeping a right-wing ideologue out of power was a priority, but the decision reflects a bigger change in perspective. The NDP has been drifting toward the political centre in a bid to regain relevance and capture votes, a trend that accelerated in the most recent federal election.

It’s a shift that Hargrove opposes, just as he publicly opposed the election of Jack Layton to the party’s leadership in 2003. “My choice is between two parties that are centre parties,” says Hargrove. “My choice isn't between a socialist party and a centrist party.”

But the union leader dealt his heaviest blow to the party during the 2006 federal election. He didn't just push strategic voting, he took the stage with Paul Martin and wrapped the prime minister in the union’s colours — a CAW jacket.

“Paul Martin was the only prime minister we had in the past 30 years who met regularly with the labour movement,” he says, adding that “a lot of people found him better to deal with than Bob Rae.”

Wanting to split from the NDP isn’t hard to understand. Labour has been “taken for granted by the NDP and ignored by everyone else,” says Steven High, a labour history professor at Concordia University and former NDP vice-president. But, says High, “hitching with the Liberals, you’re not solving that problem.”

The CAW leader’s support for the Liberals was seen as a betrayal in the eyes of many New Democrats, and the party publicly terminated Hargrove’s membership. At the time, rumours ran rampant that Hargrove was angling for a senate appointment. More recently, rumours flew that he was going to run for the Liberals in the 2008 federal election, but he turned down the chance to run in Whitby-Oshawa, his home riding.

“I’d flirted with it for a while, it was very attractive for me to run against (finance minister) Jim Flaherty,” he says. “I think he’s the mastermind behind the lack of support for manufacturing. If it wasn't for him out defending the government and hammering and trying to blame the Province of Ontario, I think there’d be a lot more pressure on the government. I would have loved to have exposed that, but at the end of the day I thought, ‘Oh My God, I could get elected.’ I don’t want to spend my last few years with my wife in Toronto and me spending all those months in Ottawa. We collectively, as a family, decided that I’m not going to be a candidate.”

Hargrove began to rise in his union just as the American auto industry began its slow decline. He became a shop steward in 1965, the same year that Canada and the United States signed the Auto Pact. The historic trade agreement would keep plants in Canada, at least for the next four decades, but would also make the Canadian auto industry a mere branch of the U.S. industry with the high-value jobs in management, engineering and design residing south of the border.

By the 1980s, the North American economy had slumped into recession, and economic nationalism was on the rise. Also, a notable rift had formed between the Canadian branch of the United Auto Workers and its U.S. parent. When the Canadians seceded in 1985, Hargrove was there. He was the right-hand man of Bob White, the Canadian union leader. There were a host of good reasons for the split, ranging from control of finances to ideological differences between the Canadian locals, dominated by the left, and the American parent union, which was more right wing. The American union was ready to make concessions with the automakers, while the Canadians wanted to fight to save jobs.

Support for the split was widespread, Hargrove says, and his role in the debate was “firefighter.” He’d travel to locals that weren’t onside with the union executive’s position, and convince them to join the movement. In the end, every local save one joined with the group that is now the Canadian Auto Workers. That split remains the most significant decision in the union’s history. Not only did it give the union local control, but it may have saved it altogether.

“One reason why Canadian unions haven’t got caught in the collapse of the United States is that they haven’t gone to concessions and fighting for table scraps,” says High.

It was the first of many controversial moves Hargrove would be involved in. The list later grew to include the “Rae Days” fight, the split from the NDP, and a shift in tactics when he negotiated a no-strike agreement with Magna International Inc.

Over that time, the CAW has had to change its strategy dramatically. With factories closing, it had to shore up its ranks by expanding into new industries. Today, it’s the largest private-sector union in Canada, boasting more than a quarter-million members. But it lost numbers in high-paying automobile factory jobs, and gained them in more marginal fields, such as restaurant workers, and in more white-collar industries such as health care.

Hargrove is immensely proud of his union and his record, and defends it fiercely. But he’s a bit coy about his proudest achievement, giving a lengthy answer that, in short, is the legacy of a union that’s strong and progressive. He rattles off a list of charitable donations and causes, the entrance of women to the union’s senior ranks, and the inclusion of gays and lesbians. “I’m very proud of that,” he says. “I leave it as the most open, democratic union.”

While he’s successfully navigated his union through the shift from a growing North American auto industry to a shrinking one, he has not been so successful at uniting the fragmented labour movement itself. The Canadian Labour Congress expelled the CAW in 2000 because of tactics it considered to be “raiding” — when one union sets out to sign up the workers in a local of another union. The CAW and Congress settled, and the union rejoined, but Hargrove still disagrees with the CLC on the raiding issue.

The anti-raiding policy is “archaic” and one “I totally oppose,” he says. “Workers should have the right to join whatever union they like.”

Anti-raiding policy is just something that unions hide behind when they’re failing to provide the services their members want, he says. It’s a position that’s bitten him back, as the Steelworkers just undermined Hargrove’s own success at opening Magna up for organizing by signing up workers at one of the CAW’s coveted plants. While Hargrove says he “supports the Steelworkers” in their organizing efforts, relations between the two major industrial unions are strained.

But that tension is good for the labour movement, he argues. “We’ve always had this respectful relationship with steel. Respectful, but competitive.”

“I do respect that Buzz has been a strong voice for auto industry jobs and the auto industry in Canada,” says Leo Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers. But he adds that he’s disappointed by the “division [Hargrove] has fostered in labour” thanks to the raiding, and by “picking up his marbles and quitting the NDP.”

One reason why Hargrove is so controversial is that he’s willing to try new approaches to organizing and bargaining. In October 2007, he negotiated a deal with Magna that allowed the CAW to organize the company’s plants, but the union had to agree there would be no strikes. Instead, disputes would be settled by binding arbitration.

“With this agreement, Magna and the CAW will develop a new way of working together,” Hargrove told reporters at the time. “It will strengthen the CAW's ability to support auto-parts workers at an incredibly challenging time, but in a way that also strengthens Canada’s auto industry.”

It was a novel way to open the door. The union had been trying to organize Magna workers for decades, but had been successfully blocked by the company. But the contract was anathema to many in the labour movement.

“There was a lot of angst in the labour movement and anger in the labour movement when Buzz negotiated that secret deal with Magna,” says Gerard. The deal removed the right to strike, got rid of the traditional system of shop stewards and, moreover, represented an ideological change in the union’s leadership.

“The CAW’s abandonment of the right to strike at Magna has enormous implications in terms of the labour movement’s struggles (including in the CAW) to win this democratic right,” Sam Gindin wrote in Socialist Project in October 2007. “And it mindlessly undermines those workers who never had this right or have seen it eroded as governments expanded the scope of ‘essential services,’ or introduced back-to-work legislation. If it is the case that, as the CAW press kit claims, 30,000 CAW members don’t have the right to strike, is this not of concern to the union?”

Gindin is a former chief economist for the union, and was an assistant to both Bob White and Hargrove, but has since become one of Hargrove’s most outspoken critics.

Hargrove dismisses what he calls “armchair critics,” and points again to the fact that the agreement did open the door at Magna and allowed the union to organize as many of the company's workers as it did in the two decades prior. And that’s important at a time when the ranks of workers in the auto industry are thinning. The Magna deal was “risky,” says High, and “courageous.”

“It’s trying to be the protagonist and shape the agenda.”

Other than very directed anger, Hargrove seldom shows much outward emotion. But the heat he took over the Magna deal clearly has stayed with him, as well as criticism at the hands of former allies. It was a hard-won battle, and even in defending it, he sounds excited by the challenge he faced. Getting into Magna wasn’t easy. The no-strike concession meant that other workers would have to stand up for the rights of Magna employees, and that could mean strikes at other plants to put pressure on Magna’s clients. Some of those workers weren't keen on being put in that position.

“I had a huge backlash from our membership in both Windsor and in Brampton. When I went to the ratification meeting the membership booed the hell out of me,” says Hargrove. But with his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the union’s history, Hargrove chose to talk about the historic 1945 Ford Strike — a long, bitter strike involving more than 14,000 workers. It was the strike that created the modern union, and he reminded the union members it was one that would not have been won without the support of workers at other plants, even city employees and non-union workers. At the end of the speech, he says he received a solid round of applause. It’s the sort of turnaround that he relishes.

The Magna deal highlights another aspect of Hargrove’s strategy — don’t wait for the fight to come to you, go to the fight. It was why he opened negotiations with Ford, Chrysler and GM in the spring of 2008, instead of waiting until autumn. He didn’t think the economic situation would improve and figured he’d get a successful settlement faster by negotiating early. He did. After signing the contract, the U.S. economy tanked. And nobody could have predicted that General Motors would so shamefully renege on its contract, as it did only two weeks after inking the deal.

But Hargrove stands by the decision for early negotiation. And he’s proud of his track record, even the parts that many of his current and former allies are uncomfortable or angry with. He’s navigated the union through a massive economic change — including the 1990s neoconservative revolution, the decades-long North American industrial decline and the more recent economic crisis.

The union has its own internal problems, which became public during its acrimonious leadership changeover last summer. But Ken Lewenza inherited from Hargrove a strong, if politically isolated, union. He'll need that strength if he’s to successfully push the union’s latest, and most pressing demand: opening up the Asian market to North American manufacturers. Win that fight, and the playing field will balance, the CAW’s line goes. Valuable auto sector jobs will be saved, and the Canadian economy will benefit.

Globalization means one more round of changes are coming, and the fight over Asian markets is one more challenge to tackle creatively. This time, however, Hargrove will have to watch from the sidelines — an unnatural place for a man who likes to handle negotiations personally. He’s now busy writing a book, but undoubtedly his voice will be heard, if nowhere else then certainly on the Business News Network’s SqueezePlay show, as host of a new weekly commentary segment called “Buzz Cuts.” If he brings the full bearing of his personality to the show, then he's got a great career ahead of him as a pundit. Or should that be “armchair critic?”



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