It saddened me that Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove popped the question to his long-time partner on the big screen at the CAW convention in Vancouver. I’m not anti-romantic. All the world loves a lover, including me. And Buzz did say it’s because the union is “really my family.”

But a lot depends on where he put the stress: It’s my family. Or: It’s my family, if you get my drift. It’s not as though anyone else there, or in CAW workplaces, could have used that platform. It made his members spectators to events in his private life instead of being participants in their own. That’s the essence of celebrity culture. Some lives count more than others.

I speak without rancour. Buzz has been a dynamic, courageous and creative leader. I say that based on the public record and private experience. But I feel his instincts failed him here and I’ll risk a guess at why. We live in an era when, says McMaster prof Henry Giroux, “communities crumble and give way to individualized one-man archipelagos.” With the Cold War’s end and the collapse of the left into boutiques such as human rights, feminism and environmentalism, it’s hard to find a counterbalance to the glorification of mighty individuals.

Unions should embody a more communal standpoint, but they exist in the general individualistic context and are easily overwhelmed by it. So union leaders start to approximate CEOs and media stars.

That tendency is not new to labour, more’s the pity. Last week, I heard a journalism student say she’d been told not to use “working class” in stories since it evokes negative stereotypes the way mentions of race do in crime stories. Yet, unions arose precisely to insist on the nobility of workers and of ordinary people’s role in society. “It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade; dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid” — runs the anthem Solidarity Forever. It was about respect for them, not just a bigger slice of the pie, or “More,” as U.S. union icon Samuel Gompers once said, when asked what unions want.

Those tensions haven’t vanished. This week, The New York Times reported that the current U.S. expansion is the first in which output and productivity both rose but most people’s wages declined. All the new wealth went to corporate profits and the top few earners. Everyone produced the increase, but the rich creamed it off. This is simply unfair, and workers will want not just a cut but basic economic justice.

The reason they keep losing out, say economists, is lessened bargaining power due to declines in union strength. And what caused that? Mostly it’s trade “liberalization,” a.k.a. free trade, globalization etc. Even Ben Bernanke, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, says this kind of inequity — once workers realize it — could “derail” further trade liberalization, thus acknowledging the real source of the rip-off.

That dynamic — globalization as a device to rob workers — has been obscured since 9/11 by the obsession with terror. Some unions backed out of anti-globalization protests right afterward. Yet, it continues to eat its way through people’s lives. Buzz Hargrove’s CAW recently agreed to historic contract concessions out of fear of globalization’s impact on its members. One benefit of a sense of self-respect and dignity is that those feelings help lend workers the confidence to resist the forces that stiff or demean them.

In Bob Dylan’s new CD, Modern Times, there’s a Workingman’s Blues that is mainly a passive lament (with a hint of resistance) on the grim lot of workers. It contrasts with the Talking Union Blues of the ’30s that urged workers to “take it easy but take it.” Or Woody Guthrie’s: “When the love of the poor shall one day turn to hate./ When the patience of the workers gives away/ Would be better for you rich if you never had been born.”

As for Canadian parallels, the poet Milton Acorn once said that what irked him in Irving Layton’s “undoubtedly memorable” lines — Some tell me that I should not write/ About the workers and their plight — was that “fight” also rhymes with plight. It’s what unions could be about, and Labour Day.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.