Bob White, president of UAW Canada, 1981Thirty years ago, Windsor — and Chrysler — faced a moment much like this one. In the autumn of 1979, the company teetered on the precipice of bankruptcy. It had positioned itself as a manufacturer of youthful cars, the hip counterpart to the more staid GM and Ford. But its Dodge Chargers and Plymouth Road Runners, with their neon paint jobs and hot rod engine packages, were never huge sellers. At its peak, the Plymouth Duster, a Chrysler success story, had sales of just over 280,000 units; in the same year, 1974, Ford sold nearly 386,000 of its comparable but higher-priced Mustangs. Meanwhile, new environmental realities were taking their toll, as Chrysler struggled to meet new emissions and safety standards levied by the US government in the early ’70s.
To cope with all this, the company’s executives slashed costs, particularly via staff reductions, a strategy that backfired in the fall of 1978 when its new models arrived four months after those of its competitors. That year, American automakers sold a record-high 12.9 million vehicles, yet Chrysler lost $205 million. And when oil shocks, inflation, and high interest rates began to depress the industry, Chrysler again fared worst, with a 30 percent decline in sales and losses of nearly $1.1 billion. Then, as now, it tried to stave off bankruptcy by seeking a new owner, but in the end it only managed to sell its European operations to Peugeot-Citroen. What saved it was the hiring of former Ford president Lee Iacocca, who initiated an audacious turnaround that included bailouts in the form of loan guarantees from the American and Canadian governments — plus demands for unprecedented wage and benefit concessions from the auto unions.
At the time, Canadian auto workers were represented by a new union leader. Bob White had led the Canadian region of the United Auto Workers for about a year when Iacocca started at Chrysler. White’s membership was far different from today’s. Unionists were much more combative then, and they expected more from their leadership. Membership meetings sometimes resembled riots. Fist fights were not uncommon. And Windsor’s Local 444, Canada’s biggest Chrysler chapter, was one of the most cantankerous groups on the continent.
Iacocca’s first concession proposal asked Local 444 and other North American Chrysler workers to delay the start date of a new labour contract by six months, which would have saved the company $200 million. It would also have marked the first time the uaw allowed pay hike deferrals by one of the Big Three. Much to the 444’s dismay, the union eventually consented. The local had been hit hard by the company’s ongoing problems, starting with the 1978 closing of Chrysler Plant 1, which made pickup trucks; and Plant 2, which built big six-cylinder and V-8 engines. Members believed the American-run uaw had sold them out. As White recalled in his memoirs, “They were furious.”
The union boss was in Chrysler Canada’s executive offices, then located immediately adjacent to the Windsor Assembly Plant, when what he later described as a “boiling mob” began to agitate. Someone pitched a brick through a window. The more industrious fashioned effigies to dangle by the neck. Some of these read, “Hang Iacocca.” More troubling for White were the ones attacking the union, such as “Hang Doug Fraser,” the uaw’s leader. And then there was “Hang Bob White.”
Days later, the US treasury secretary demanded still more concessions in exchange for $1.5 billion in loan guarantees. The government wanted Iacocca and the uaw to open up the agreement they’d just negotiated, and for Chrysler to cut another $259 million in labour costs. Perhaps remembering 444’s angry demonstration, Bob White said no. Defying Fraser’s direction, he declared that his Canadian members would not be ordered around by the US government. “I want to make it absolutely clear to all of you today,” he promised a Local 444 meeting at a Windsor arena. “No American government official is going to change what happens here.” In his memoirs, he speculates that “the reason the uaw was being asked to take cuts was that the government needed something to throw to the wolves of public opinion. Spending taxpayers’ money to bail out a big corporation like Chrysler wasn’t a popular move.”
The Americans weren’t pleased. “Well, fuck you Canadians,” one uaw executive said to White. “If you’re not going to make the sacrifice with us, then we’re going to demand that all the jobs come over here. Chrysler Canada’s gone.” It was the sort of threat negotiators had made for decades, and White didn’t blink. It helped, of course, that the Trudeau government had the Canadian auto industry’s back. Industry Minister Herb Gray was from Windsor, and when the Canadian government granted Chrysler $200 million in loan guarantees, it made them conditional on the company continuing to build cars in Canada.
Iacocca, meanwhile, was preparing to go back to the US government for another $400 million, but not before asking the uaw for another, even more significant round of cuts, worth perhaps $4 an hour. Unwilling to worsen his relationship with the union’s leaders, White chose not to criticize their decision to go along with the cuts. But neither did he issue a recommendation to his members on whether to ratify them. In the end, Local 444 rejected the concessions, although other Canadian locals carried the day: 51 percent of Chrysler’s Canadian workers opted for ratification.
It was a watershed moment for Canadian auto workers. Lingering displeasure over the deal led to widespread disruption in the Chrysler workforce, a long-standing “no concessions” policy within the Canadian union, the 1985 secession of White’s Canadian region from the uaw, and the subsequent formation of the Canadian Auto Workers union. “We’ve learned the hard way what happens when workers attempt to save their jobs with concessions,” read one union text. “Demands for concessions [lead] to more demands for concessions. Workers end up competing to see who can give away the most.”
Looking back, this stance seems almost quaint.
On the evening of March 11 of this year, while Mike Melo and his fellow union members manned the barricades in Windsor, Chrysler president Tom LaSorda, a Canadian, was testifying before a Commons committee on Parliament Hill. In a month when only 122,194 vehicles sold in Canada, a 17.7 percent decline from the previous year, he was asked what would happen if the caw didn’t accept concessions to bring Chrysler’s labour costs in line with those at non-unionized plants run by Honda and Toyota. His reply made up in bluntness what it lacked in creativity. He said what Chrysler executives had been claiming for decades: the company would pull out of Canada.
The ultimatum only fuelled anger along the Aramco and Aradco lines. On St. Patrick’s Day, exactly a week after the blockade began, Chrysler deployed another security detail to accompany a flatbed truck in a third attempt to get into one of the shops — and nearly triggered a riot. Some 100 workers staffed the blockade. Melo was among the group that gathered around the rig’s cab in an ultimately successful attempt to stop it from going in. “You try not to give the police an excuse to act,” he recalls. “But that one got pretty heated — lots of four-letter words.” At some point, workers noticed the nearby presence of the sort of police vehicle once known as a “paddy wagon.”
Worried that the police were planning to use riot dispersal tactics, Melo and other union leaders decided to execute the operation they had been planning since the weekend. Accompanied by nine men selected for their clean police records and trustworthiness, he drove to a parking lot adjacent to the building that held Chrysler’s most valuable equipment. What the men were about to do was straight from the playbook of the activist unions of days past. During a twenty-month strike in the mid-’70s at the United Aircraft facility in Longueuil, Quebec, for example, thirty-four workers smashed their way into the plant with the help of a commandeered truck. In 1979, disgruntled workers in Oshawa, Ontario, staged a thirteen-day takeover of the Houdaille Industries bumper plant. Closer to home, seventeen men occupied the Windsor Bumper company in 1981; Melo was then just six years old.
He and his cohorts infiltrated the yard, toting duffel bags with enough supplies to keep them fed and clothed for a prolonged stay. Once inside, they seized forklifts to push massive steel coils and other heavy objects in front of the entrance. By about half past five on St. Patrick’s Day, they had the plant under their control.
The next day, the union staged a show of support that was as much a celebration as a rally. Several hundred people showed up, including caw director Ken Lewenza and the riding’s ndp Member of Parliament, Joe Comartin. As the rally began, Jerry Dias, Ken Lewenza’s number two, snuck into the shop to deliver good news to Melo and his men: Chrysler had submitted a better offer. The occupiers emerged from the building to raucous applause. Referring to “the heroes of Local 195,” Lewenza promised, “There’s tens of thousands of workers facing the same experience that are going home with absolutely nothing. Who’s speaking on behalf of our workers? Who’s defending the interests of the workers? The momentum doesn’t stop here.”
