National Post (National Edition)
UNIFOR BOSS PROVES DOUBTERS WRONG.
THEY SAID HE WAS CRAZY, BUT AUTO UNION BOSS JERRY DIAS WON HUGE GAINS FROM THE BIG 3 — ALL WITHOUT HAVING TO STRIKE
Jerry Dias’s rise to president of Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, was an education in labour strife. As a teenager, he once made sandwiches for striking workers at de Havilland’s aircraft plant in Toronto where his father was local president. That factory was so ridden with conflict in 1990 — three years after Dias became local president just like his dad — that when workers reached a collective agreement without a strike for the first time in 23 years, they had plaques made to commemorate the occasion.
He’s come a long way since those pugnacious days, and recently wrapped up a tense round of contract negotiations with the Big Three automakers without a strike at any of them, much to the surprise of even his closest confidantes.
Dias even managed to secure $1.6 billion of new investment from the companies at a time when they have been pulling away from Canada, forestalling the closure of at least two Ontario plants and winning gains for the 23,000 autoworkers employed at the Big 3.
It wasn’t always clear that Dias would be able to get past his combative reputation.
After joining the national staff of the union — then the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), before a 2013 merger created Unifor — then-president Buzz Hargrove said something to him that hit home.
“When I moved to the auto file, Buzz and Jim O’Neill, who was the secretarytreasurer at the time, met with me to say, ‘Listen, we know that you know how to fight, but do you know how to settle?’,” Dias said in an interview after the last round of auto negotiations wrapped up this month. “I never forgot that. I never forgot that.” It turns out he does know how to settle. Now 58, Dias leads more than 310,000 members across every major sector of the economy. During three months of talks that concluded Nov. 5, Unifor reached new collective agreements with General Motors of Canada Co., FCA Canada Inc. and Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd.
The talks began, however, with Dias throwing down the gauntlet and telling all three companies that there would be strikes unless they agreed to invest in Canada.
“I’m not surprised we got investment from all three companies; what I’m surprised about is we did it without a strike,” said Whitey MacDonald, director of the auto sector at Unifor.
MacDonald was involved in the negotiations with all three companies and describes Dias as a “personal friend,” but he doesn’t bite his tongue when describing his uncompromising approach to bargaining.
“A lot of people thought, ‘You know what? This guy’s crazy. We’re going to have a bunch of strikes,’” he said.
“But we had three home runs and it was his determination that got us there.”
Even Dias himself is surprised he managed to avoid a strike, particularly at GM, which will close one of its two plants in Oshawa, Ont., next year and was set to close the second one in 2018 before it agreed to invest $554 million in its Canadian operations, including $400 million in Oshawa.
Dias chose GM as the target company, meaning it would set the negotiating pattern that would then be applied to Ford and FCA, even though he knew it would be the most difficult one to win over.
“People may have questioned my sanity for the positions I took, but if we couldn’t solidify the industry today, then we would have been naive at best to think somehow things were going to get better four years down the road,” said Dias, who still can’t resist a good fight metaphor. “Look, you can get punched out in the weigh-in or you can get beat up in the middle of the ring. I choose the ring.”
GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler declined to comment on the negotiations.
It’s clear that Dias is being modest when he describes himself as a “fairly confident guy,” and it’s that confidence that has carried him through a union career that sometimes feels like it was preordained.
In 1972, when Dias was 14, there was a nine-month strike at the de Havilland plant where his father was local union president.
“The bargaining committee would meet at our house a fair bit, and my job was to make their toasted bacon-and-tomato sandwiches,” he said.
Aside from making sandwiches, his first real job was at age 16 as a counsellor at the union’s Family Education Centre in Port Elgin, Ont. — essentially a summer camp for workers and their families.
“I really was indoctrinated from a pretty early age,” Dias said. “I was raised in that environment. It’s all I knew.”
Dias was hired at de Havilland in 1978 and, with the exception of a brief period when he was laid off and went to work at the now-shuttered GM van plant in Toronto, stayed there for the next 15 years, becoming steward, then plant chairman and finally local president just like his father.
He was hired on to the national staff of the CAW in 1993 and continued his rise through the union’s ranks, first as the coordinator for the aerospace sector, then national representative for Chrysler workers, and finally as a top assistant to Hargrove and his successor, Ken Lewenza. When Unifor was formed in 2013, Lewenza retired and Dias was elected president of the new union.
Dias credits both Hargrove and Lewenza for shaping him into the negotiator he is today.
“What I learned from both of them is that you have to follow your instincts and that usually is the right path,” he said.
Those instincts served Dias well in the latest round of auto negotiations. Despite the misgivings of some of his advisers, he went with his gut and chose GM as the target company.
“As long as I’ve known Jerry, I was as shocked as anybody else that he went to GM … that’s his instincts, that’s his gut,” Lewenza said. “People were kind of second-guessing him at first, but when you see the end result, it worked out pretty good for the industry, it worked out good for our members, and I’ll go deeper and say it’s worked out pretty good for the country.”
Tony Faria, co-director of the University of Windsor’s Office of Automotive and Vehicle Research, said he initially thought Dias had made a big mistake by drawing “such a hard line in the sand.”
“After all, these were negotiations and negotiations are talks between two sides to reach a common goal. You’ve got to have give and take on both sides,” Faria said. “But after the fact, I have to give him full credit. He said what he wanted, he stated his goals clearly, he achieved them all — he did a very, very good job.”
To Dias, there was far more at stake in this round of negotiations than in 2009, when GM and Chrysler were in bankruptcy protection and the future of the entire industry was at stake.
Back then, bailouts from the federal and Ontario governments came with the condition that both companies had to maintain a certain manufacturing footprint in Canada. In other words, the country was guaranteed to have an industry as long as there was an industry to have, at least in the near term.
Those commitments expired this year and the Detroit Three were making noises about pulling back. Aside from the potential GM closure in Oshawa, there was a good chance that Ford would close its engine plants in Windsor, Ont., without new product investment. The threat at Fiat Chrysler wasn’t as immediate, but Dias knew he had to get an investment in the company’s assembly plant in Brampton, Ont., to secure its long-term future.
In the end, all three companies agreed to invest. In addition to GM’s $554 million, Ford committed $713 million and Fiat Chrysler promised $331 million. The deals won’t necessarily create many jobs, but they will keep hundreds of jobs that would otherwise have been lost.
“This was really a do-or-die moment for the future of the industry,” Dias said. “I think they understood that we weren’t posturing and, trust me, we were not posturing at all, because we were in a situation where we actually had nothing to lose. I firmly believe that.”
Of course, Unifor is much larger than the auto sector and Dias is quick to emphasize that the union can be a haven for all Canadian workers, whether or not they’re members.
“You can build an organization with soul, and that means a principled organization that understands the challenges of working-class people,” he said, adding that he disagrees with Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s recent statement that Canadians should get used to job churn.
“I don’t buy the argument that it’s inevitable, that the entire world is going to be precarious, part-time, non-standard jobs and that’s just the way it is so get used to it,” he said. “Not a chance.”
Whatever happens, it’s certain that there will be a lot more unsettling times for Canadian workers, particularly autoworkers despite the gains made by Unifor. The election of an unpredictable, anti-trade U.S. president in the form of Donald Trump elicits a visceral reaction from Dias, who describes Trump’s platform as “the politics of hatred.”
However, Dias agrees with Trump on at least one thing, which is the negative impact of free trade on working-class people. “He is right when he says working-class people in the U.S. have gotten the short end of the stick on NAFTA,” Dias said. “I totally agree, just like the working-class people in Canada have ended up on the short end of the stick.”
Likewise, Dias agrees with Trump that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact, which now appears to be dead in the water, should stay that way.
“I would agree with him that the TPP should be blocked and I would also agree with him that NAFTA needs to be renegotiated, but I don’t agree with anything else that comes out of his mouth,” he said.
Asked what he wants his legacy to be, Dias seems to be taken off guard, saying he’s “never really rolled that way,” but quickly recovers.
“I will view myself as successful if our members feel more secure when I leave than when we created Unifor,” he said. “I just want people to know that I really, really, really worked hard on their behalf.”
IF WE COULDN’T SOLIDIFY THE INDUSTRY TODAY, THEN WE WOULD HAVE BEEN NAIVE AT BEST TO THINK SOMEHOW THINGS WERE GOING TO GET BETTER FOUR YEARS DOWN THE ROAD. — JERRY DIAS, PRESIDENT OF UNIFOR, ON AUTO TALKS