Harnessing competition? The UAW and competitiveness in the Canadian auto industry, 1945--1990

Contemporary social democratic arguments contend that intensified global competition presents trade unions with the challenge of steering competition onto a 'high-road' of rapid productivity growth and high-quality production. By reorganizing workers and combatting wage-cutting, while forming partnerships to assist employers in improving flexibility and productivity, unions can stabilize competition's destructive aspects while promoting progressive forms of competitiveness. The theoretical support for this strategy is supplied by institutionalist arguments maintaining that the choice between constructive or destructive competition rests, among other determinants, on trade union approaches to shaping competitive strategy.;Employing a Marxian theory of competition, this dissertation argues that the contradictions and limits of the high-road strategy were revealed in postwar trade union approaches to competition which aimed primarily at shaping private investment, production, and employment decisions through a mixture of inducements and cost disincentives. Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers union pursued a combination of pattern collective bargaining and public policy initiatives as a means of manipulating business rivalry in the interests of labour, but the vision was frustrated by the course of competitive accumulation itself, leaving the union ill-prepared to confront the intensification of international competition and subsequent business offensive against labour in the 1970s and 1980s. The decentralization of production, the foreign direct investment and international sourcing of the auto companies, and the competitive drive on the shopfloor all weakened the International union's ability to respond to the rise of global competition, while its traditional orientation encouraged a retreat from support for free trade to protectionism and concessions in an attempt to bolster the competitiveness of US automakers in the 1970s and 1980s. By contrast, the Canadian region of the UAW was able to articulate an independent position toward competitiveness pressures and concession bargaining, in large part due to its historical interest in detaching production and investment from purely competitive market determination as a means of counteracting the vulnerability arising from the dependent nature of the Canadian automotive industry.