Re-scaling collective bargaining: union responses to restructuring in the North American auto industry

Abstract

Historically, political struggles to define the geographical scale at which labour relations and collective bargaining will be conducted have been of crucial significance to the labour movement. Today, workers and their unions face very difficult challenges. In many manufacturing industries changes in the organizational structure of production at different geographical scales have undermined the effectiveness of the organizing and collective bargaining strategies associated with traditional industrial unionism. This paper focuses on collective bargaining strategies developed by North American autoworkers’ unions to respond to the extensive restructuring of the automotive industry that took place during the 1990s. These strategies include innovations in the structure and content of collective bargaining and efforts to redefine the scale at which collective bargaining takes place. Following a brief discussion of the challenge posed by the integration of Mexico into a continent-wide production system, the analysis focuses on the strategies devised by the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union during the 1996 and 1999 rounds of collective bargaining to address issues raised by outsourcing and modular manufacturing. With outsourcing, the automakers are not so much eliminating jobs as they are deciding who gets to do them, at what price, and under what working conditions. With modular manufacturing, the organizational boundaries between firms are blurring and the terms and conditions of work in one firm arguably are becoming dependent upon management decisions made in another firm. The CAW’s response has been to develop new collective bargaining strategies including the concepts of ‘work ownership’ and ‘satellite bargaining’ which involves redefining the traditional geographical extent of the bargaining unit. While the empirical focus is on the North American automobile industry, the general issues related to the re-scaling of production, and especially outsourcing and modular manufacturing, are common across a range of manufacturing industries.