UNIONS AIM FOR BETTER DEAL
Unifor, UAW join fight over NAFTA
The Trump administration has found a pair of powerful allies in its push for a major overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement — two of the continent’s biggest private-sector labour unions.
After the closure of auto plants and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in that sector alone, “a tweak and a little twist here and there is not gonna fix it,” Unifor president Jerry Dias told the Star about NAFTA. “The numbers speak for themselves — there has to be a wholesale overhaul.”
After 23 years of the tri-national trade agreement, Dias said Mexico has six per cent of the auto market but 45 per cent of the auto jobs. Over the past decade, Canada has lost four vehicle assembly plants and the U.S. has lost 10 facilities, while Mexico has gained eight, and the trend continues. Mexican vehicle production has shot up from two million units in 2008 to 3.6 million today, with a 2018 projection of five million units, according to a joint Unifor/UAW statement issued this week.
Unifor and the United Auto Workers announced Tuesday they were joining forces to push for “major improvements” to NAFTA’s auto provisions. Dias met that day in Washington with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Wednesday with Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland to talk NAFTA, softwood lumber and steel trade issues.
Ross “absolutely agrees with us,” said Dias, who previously sat down with U.S. President Donald Trump’s key official on trade just two months ago. Freeland, he added, also “understands there are some major, major problems with NAFTA.”
No sooner had Trump — who calls NAFTA “the worst trade deal in the history of the world” — been sworn into office in January than Canadian officials sought assurances that the new Republican administration did not want major changes to NAFTA that might be harmful to Canada.
“Little tweaks, or a do-nothing approach, won’t cut it,” UAW president Dennis Williams said in Tuesday’s joint statement. The UAW, one of the largest and most diverse unions in North America with 420,000 members, threw its support behind Democrat Hillary Clinton in last year’s U.S. election.
Mexico is the problem, said both union leaders, but they don’t blame Mexican workers.
“Mexican workers have been shafted, as well as Canadian and American workers,” said Dias. The average autoworker in Mexico only makes $3.95 an hour, there are “essentially no independent unions,” and successive Mexican governments “have failed to protect and advance workers’ fundamental rights,” he said.
NAFTA is the one thing Dias agrees on with Trump. Dias, whose union representing 310,000 workers is Canada’s largest in the private sector, said he’s “not there sipping tea with Wilbur,” but rather negotiating for the interests of Canada and the quarter-million autoworkers represented by Unifor and the UAW.
One of Unifor’s predecessor unions, the Canadian Auto Workers, split acrimoniously from the UAW in 1984.
Unifor and the UAW have identified four priorities that need addressing in the renegotiation of NAFTA’s auto provisions: raising wages and labour standards in Mexico; balancing trade; improving “Made in North America” rules; and ensuring workers in each country “get a fair share of the benefits of the industry.”
It’s not just Mexico within NAFTA. The two unions argue North America suffers from “persistent and growing automotive trade deficits with other key auto-production regions, including Japan, South Korea, the EU and, increasingly, China.”
A “perfect illustration” of the problem, said Dias, is General Motors deciding to move the Terrain vehicle, and 600 Ontario assembly jobs, out of its CAMI plant — “the No. 1 productive plant in the world” — to Mexico.
“We’ve lost half our industry,” said Dias.
Following a 90-day consultation window, NAFTA talks officially begin in August.
Dias is confident Canada won’t be bullied in trade talks and that Canadians would be quite understanding if negotiators walk rather than agree to a bad deal.
“Canadians inherently think that Trump is nuts,” he said.