Auto union has learned its lesson about ‘hug’

It was the hug seen around the world.

The Detroit Three automakers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union were settling down to begin labour negotiations last summer. As is the custom, each company held a launch ceremony to mark the official start of talks with handshakes and a preliminary sharing of proposals.

These events are usually goodnatured — even if talks are bound to get tense later on, the players want to show that they’re heading in with an open mind. But when UAW president Dennis Williams leaned in to embrace Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV chief executive Sergio Marchionne, union members were aghast.

“That make-out fest that Williams and Marchionne did, that was quite impressive for the corporate world, but not for the guys that bleed blood and sweat and give their bodies up in the plant,” worker Tony Leonard told the Detroit Free Press.

It was a bad omen for the negotiations, which proved to be an utter embarrassment for the UAW. By fall, the union’s members had rejected one contract, partially rejected another and barely ratified a third — the first time since 1982 that U.S. autoworkers had rebuffed a national agreement endorsed by their leadership.

Unifor, the union representing more than 23,000 Canadian autoworkers at the Detroit Three, is vowing not to make the same mistakes as it begins its own set of negotiations, which officially launched in Toronto this past week.

“We’ll be very transparent during this set of negotiations, we’ll be very active on social media,” Unifor president Jerry Dias told workers and reporters Thursday. “Why? Because we want to make sure that our members and the public understand what is going on and what is at stake.”

Dias’s reference to social media singles out a key area in which the UAW is thought to have failed during its negotiations last year. The union was praised for having a robust social-media strategy during its 2011 talks, using Facebook to communicate directly with members and dispel any misconceptions they might have about the proposed contracts before they voted on them.

Oddly, it failed to repeat this strategy during the 2015 negotiations and instead let members spread misinformation about the proposed contracts and bash the leadership on Facebook, Twitter and other forums.

“One can argue that people weren’t prepared for the socialmedia blitz,” Dias said in a recent interview. “There weren’t enough conversations, I would argue, with the members leading into bargaining. I think we’ve learned from that and we’re obviously going to spend a lot of time communicating directing with our members throughout the process.”

Dias said Unifor has studied the UAW’s experience closely and won’t repeat its mistakes.

“We saw what happened,” Dias said. “We’ve learned our lessons.”