This is an opinion piece that I never expected to write and do so more in sorrow than anger. It is a criticism of the action of one of Canada’s best known labour leaders in accepting, indeed in promoting, a company union approach to the challenges that face the labour movement today.

Buzz Hargrove was raised in the movement in the traditions of Walter Reuther and Dennis McDermott, leaders who understood the importance of building a free and democratic labour movement, at home and abroad, whatever struggle that required. The present leadership of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) has often employed the rhetoric of struggle and militancy âe” and not infrequently in the criticism of others in the labour and progressive movements; and now, when genuine militancy and struggle are required, we are witnessing the CAW leadership reaching back to a vanished era.

In the early 1900s, company unions were enthusiastically encouraged in industry by major corporate interests in the United States — the Rockefeller family principal among them. Such “unions” were designed by an industrial relations expert by the name of Mackenzie King, later to be the Liberal Prime Minister of Canada. They were cast aside by industrial workers, in both Canada and the United States during the Great Depression, who overwhelmingly favoured real unions and built their own autonomous organizations such as the Autoworkers and the Steelworkers.

How destructive of workers’ interests that now, early in the twenty-first century, company unionism is once again rearing its ugly head. But this time it has more than high profile and wealthy corporate proponents (the Stronachs now standing in for the Rockefellers). This time, the drive toward company unions is aided and abetted by the leaders of a union who for many years presented themselves as more militant true believers than anybody else in the movement. The irony in all of this is overwhelming.

To date, the defences offered by the CAW leadership for what is called the “Framework for Fairness Agreement” (FFA) have been unconvincing to say the least. To claim that jettisoning the right-to-strike is no big deal because it is so rarely used is just illogical. The deterrent power of the right-to-strike is precisely why itâe(TM)s rarely deployed. Nor is the automotive sector yet comparable to those allegedly essential public services without the right-to-strike.

One of the oddest ironies of course is that, until recently, the CAW itself has made a huge fetish of the right-to-strike. So much so that the union has traditionally kicked off each new round of bargaining with the Big Three automakers with a well-publicized ritual declaration of which company would be the official “strike Target.” One wonders what the new ritual will be called.

As for interest arbitration as an alternative: Mr. Hargrove is a veteran negotiator, and has been around long enough to know that genuinely positive innovation is very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with interest arbitration. There is simply not the leverage needed for a good settlement or for the kinds of bargaining breakthroughs that periodically brighten the scene for working people.

That’s not to say that public sector trade unionists haven’t shown great skill in working the tight corners of interest arbitration. They have. And they’ve done so because of engaged steward bodies — teams of activists who understand that their role is to represent their co-workers in their daily dealings and dust-ups with management. But here again, the CAW-Magna FFA comes up short. The scope for shop floor union representation is so restricted and so diffuse that itâe(TM)s difficult to imagine how union members (and I mean workers who self-identify as union members) and the “employee advocates” will develop the kind of daily militancy that is required to protect each othersâe(TM) rights in an oppressive work climate — let alone take someone’s unresolved “concern” (don’t say “grievance”) to arbitration.

And as I read the FFA, if you have any kind of disciplinary record, donâe(TM)t even try to get on a “fairness committee,” or become an “employee advocate.” I imagine that until now the CAW has been little different from my own union in the importance of activists proud to identify themselves as union members. Many of them had or still have workplace disciplinary records precisely because bosses have deemed them troublemakers and shit-disturbers. Shutting them down — restricting the rights of those with a “disciplinary record” — is no way to build an empowered local union.These same members can also often be a big pain in the butt for union leadership — I speak from experience — and that’s exactly as it should be. It is a common experience in a truly democratic environment that many of the best ideas frequently emerge from what began as complaints.

Trade unionists have to ask themselves: what is really going on here?

Let me offer a thesis to put the Framework for Fairness in context. I suggest the FFA is not the realpolitik response to crises in the auto sector that Mr. Stronach claims it is, nor is it the innovative way forward for trade unionism that Hargrove would have us swallow. Rather, I want to suggest that for corporate Canada (the Stronach vision), it is a crafty, even brilliant attempt to spike the guns of Canadian labour just as the structure of capital is going through another global shift in ownership patterns and supply chains.

But my real concern is what this means as something coming from within the labour movement. That is, what Mr. Hargrove, rather than Mr. Stronach, is really up to.

Simply put, the CAW leader’s support for the FFA looks to me like the latest development in his retrospectively crystal clear decade and a half journey from the militant left to the unashamed pro-corporate right.

His timing could not be worse. There is much reason to believe that the labour movement is turning a corner. The recent election in Australia, the opinion polls in the U.S., the struggles in France, the growing rage over income inequality and the destruction of the manufacturing base in Canada — all point to a fresh understanding by working people of the unfairness inherent in corporate globalization and to a new opportunity for the labour movement and its political allies. The response of my union is contained in its slogan “Building Power,” and in its work building global unions and international alliances.

It’s worth remembering that Hargrove’s initial disaffection with the New Democratic Party in the early 90s was couched in an allegedly leftist critique. The anger he shared with many over the Rae governmentâe(TM)s fiscal policies and over the social contract was very much voiced “from the left.” Indeed for many years both before and after the break with the party, Hargrove and others talked as if some new formation to the left of social democracy was possible and desirable in Canada — in spite of absolutely no evidence that there was a critical mass of citizens to the left of the NDP.

The next step is easy to remember. In the absence of his dream left option, Hargrove embraced “strategic voting” in an effort to stop the Conservative Party in the 1999 and 2003 Ontario elections. “Strategic voting” allowed its proponents to pretend they were being loyal to the left, while voting for the Liberal Party, Canadaâe(TM)s long-standing bastion of establishment corporate privilege, with an equally long record of hostility to the democratic labour movement.

The genie was then out of the bottle. The third step was Hargrove’s simultaneous turning on the federal New Democrats, with several loud and damaging denunciations of then party leader Alexa McDonough.

Yet many progressives still expressed surprise and disappointment at step four — Hargrove’s famous fawning embrace of Prime Minister Paul Martin (an economic conservative if there ever was one) early in the 2005-2006 federal election campaign, coupled with the now-normal scorn for the NDP and its new leader, Jack Layton. “Strategic voting” was still trotted out as the fig leaf justification, but it was clear that Hargrove was becoming very comfortable being clothed in Liberal colours.

The path was clear. Hargrove was bound to formally ally himself with the Liberal Party (step five), and that materialized in due course during the recent Ontario election. Hargrove not only endorsed the McGuinty government, but participated in Liberal nomination meetings and heaped his usual contempt on the NDPâe(TM)s effort to showcase the concerns of working people in the front window of their campaign.

Hargrove’s trek from left-of-the-NDP to strategic voter to capital-L Liberal has now culminated in an explicit embrace of the ethos of the right — the terrain where right-wing Liberals of the Martin and Stronach school feel at home with the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives and (who knows?) maybe even with some of the neo-cons gathered around Prime Minister Harper.

And, yes, this might be an outrageous claim, were it not for the evidence that the Framework for Fairness has already won vocal support from groups to the right of the Conservatives, like the Christian Heritage Party.

Let’s be clear about what the CAW leadership has done. In labourâe(TM)s ongoing struggle to achieve fairness and justice — a struggle that plays itself out every day in thousands of Canada’s workplaces — the FFA will be both explicitly and informally used by employers as a weapon against free, democratic trade unions. It will be used by the business community and its anti-union consultants as a weapon to keep an empowered independent labour movement down. The FFA is designed to keep a lid on worker dissent, however many new “members” are delivered to the CAW in the short term.

In other words, the Framework represents step six in Hargrove’s political journey. But while the first five steps could be seen as disagreements over partisan choices, over the shifting sands of electoral politics, the sixth step is qualitatively different. Its political implications are unavoidable. The Framework is a victory pact for corporate Canada — a new lease on life for company unions — and an explicit attack on the practices of independent democratic unionism. It is an obstacle to workplace progress for ordinary Canadians, because its purposes are no different from those earlier models of company unionism of a century ago.

Many of us argued that Hargrove’s anti-NDP positioning of recent years was self-destructive because of the lessons of Canadian history — especially the fact that social reform has only been embraced by Liberals in those periods when they felt the hot breath of the social democrats closing behind them. That’s why minority parliaments have been good for working people, and that’s why the Dalton McGuinty’s of the world shift left when they fear NDP gains. That’s why the NDP has always punched above its weight in public life. We argued with Buzz because we assumed, at some level, that he still shared the goals we did.

But Hargrove’s anti-NDP positioning now makes perfect sense, if progressive egalitarian change is no longer the goal he seeks. Sadly, the Framework for Fairness seems clearly to have confirmed that that is the case.

Let us hope that his colleagues and his members will convince him that the struggle continues and will persuade him to change the direction of his leadership.