Employer Neutrality Backfires for Steelworkers in Canada
The springtime news from the United Steelworkers and the Dofasco steel bosses rocked Hamilton, Ontario. Within days, the Steelworkers would be allowed into the company’s plants. They would chat with workers informally, one-on-one and in small groups, listen to their concerns, and gauge their interest in joining the union.
The process would be patient, not rushed. If it deemed the reaction sufficiently positive—no need for cards or a certification vote—the union would arrange for the election of a committee of Dofasco workers to negotiate a tentative collective agreement with union staff and the company. If the workers ratified it, the company would recognize the Steelworkers (USW).
Dofasco’s neutrality had been negotiated by the Steelworkers International in the U.S., where the expanding Arcelor-Mittal empire now owns a huge chunk of North America’s restructured steel industry and has inherited dozens of contracts with the USW.
This coup from the blue turned Hamilton, Canada’s steel capital, on its ears. Dofasco? Union? Hamilton had been a “two-company” town forever. Workers at the other company, Stelco, had joined the Steelworkers in 1946, after a long, bitter, heroic recognition strike. Succeeding years saw a series of tough negotiations and militant actions. Dofasco stood next door, defiantly unorganized. The two companies became night and day, union and non-union, troubled and profitable.
Dofasco’s owners were deeply anti-union. Increasingly half-hearted organizing drives were thwarted by various repressive tools, but also by co-optation. Wages and benefits won at Stelco were matched dollar for dollar. Worker-involvement schemes, a recreation park, “profit-sharing,” “team-building,” and the famous Christmas party built a workplace culture of community over several generations. There were Stelco families and Dofasco families. Prosperity, it implied, meant keeping a union out, and a lot of workers swallowed that.
In 2006, Dofasco was bought by the European-Indian colossus Arcelor-Mittal. Canadian management was replaced by a new generation of leaner, meaner executives. The unthinkable—large-scale layoffs—loomed as a possibility. Old certainties were evaporating.
Nevertheless, for the company to suddenly invite union reps inside its walls, where before it would have set the dogs on them, was astounding. The original owners would be churning in their galvanized steel vault.
THE FIX WAS IN
What unfolded next was just as dramatic. USW reps were greeted with scathing hostility. So intense was the antagonism that barely a week after the drive began, the union pulled its organizers and put the campaign “temporarily on hold.”
The union was naive if it believed that the ingrained deference of Dofasco workers to their company would make them receptive to the new owners’ sudden suggestion that they listen to the union.
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Did the USW really imagine, like Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq, that the liberated inhabitants of the workshops would strew the aisles with flowers? Deference to Dofasco always went hand in hand with scorn for unions, and specifically for the Steelworkers.
And trust in the company was under serious review. What were the new owners up to? As union reps strolled from machine to machine, looking for a chat on the red carpet, many workers smelled a done deal arranged over their heads. One worker told the Hamilton Spectator that if they were going to have a union, they would decide when and which union themselves, not at the request of the company.
The union made elementary mistakes. The campaign began with a joint letter to workers from the Arcelor-Mittal CEO and the USW district director, an apparent signal that the fix was in. The wooing began immediately, and it was hasty, blatant, and clumsy.
The union sent in a team of full-timers, including the director himself, to talk to the workers. These were not shop floor steelmaking activists. Seasoned members of Local 1005 at Stelco—fresh from a successful struggle against the plundering of their pension fund—were kept in the dark and uninvolved.
The Stelco workers knew the realities, and they had ties with pro-union groups at Dofasco. But the International had long been at odds with the Stelco local, which it viewed as under the sway of militants. While Stelco workers were kept in quarantine, the staffers sent in talked in generalities about what a union might do, rather than nailing workplace issues from their own experience.
UNION IN NAME ONLY
If a situation looks too good to be true, it probably is. A “neutrality” deal can only be a sidebar to an organizing drive. The hard slog of leafleting, going house to house, arranging small-group meetings in homes, coffee shops, or taverns is still required. Inside committees need to be formed, contacts built up department by department. This process builds legitimacy, provides feedback, develops leaders, and ensures that key local issues are understood. It also makes clear that solidarity versus the employer is the key to future progress.
Even if a union gets a company to deliver its workers cold into the union’s arms, the result of short-circuiting the democratic involvement of the workers will almost certainly be apathy and lack of involvement—a union in name only.
Arcelor-Mittal’s operations in Hamilton may well become unionized before too long, as conditions evolve within and without. And the USW is the obvious union to do it. But its aborted “Do-fiasco” has set things back. The next campaign will have to be done patiently, from below, and in conjunction with the other Steelworkers in Hamilton, community allies, and the rest of the labor movement.
If the company can be persuaded not to resist the campaign, so much the better. But our focus has to be on the workers themselves, their fears, pride, hopes, and needs.
John Humphrey is a former president of Steelworkers Local 5338.
