NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9284

Text File | 1992-12-14 | 3.9 KB | 69 lines

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From: New Liberation News Service <[e-mail]>
Subject: Canadian Auto Workers on Reorganiz
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/* Written  8:39 pm  Dec 13, 1992 by [e-mail] in igc:apc.labor */
/* ---------- "Canadian Auto Workers on Reorganiz" ---------- */
Canadian Auto Workers- Union on the reorganization of work

(Following are excerpts from a statement issued by Robert White, president of
CAW, and CAW Canada earlier this year. Copies of the full statement can be
obtained by writing Tom Laney, UAW Local 879........................)

This CAW statement on the reorganization of work came abgout following broad
consultations with CAW local unions and workplace leadership. They reflected
the stress and insecurity many workers are feeling about massive changes in
work organization now taking place. These -innovative- programs promoted by
management take names like team concept, partnership, quality circles,
kaizening, etc.
We [do] not support management attempts to use the team concept or quality
circles, to manage the workplace by stress, to introduce speed up, or to
encourage workers to discipline each other. We do not accept the inference
that we are part of management-s team, while other workers in the same
company, in different companies or in different geographical areas are our
enemies who must be defeated in the name of competitiveness.
Workers should not be misled into believing that with these so-called new
programs, management is offering a partnership.
Many of the same employers who promote -partnership- at work are, outside of
the workplace, actively opposed to every major legislative and social change
that would benefit working families. That includes proposed legislation on
health and safety, pay equity, indexed pensions, training and education,
workers- compensation. At the same time they endorse deregulation and
privatization, cutbacks on unemployment insurance and social services.
This -partnership- and its promises are false. The truth is that management is
not about surrendering its power, but of finding more sophisticated ways to
extend it.
Nor are these changes about creating a more liveable workplace for working
people. In spite of the rhetoric, the real aims of these programs is to break
down worker resistance to the changes management wants to implement.
The new management agenda is a sophisticated dirve to combine ideological
pressures on working people with new structures in the workplace to
dramatically change both the way workers think and the ways unions respond.
More specifically, the objective is to replace worker solidarity with total
identification with the goals of the company.
What we are saying is no to concessions and to structures that undermine union
solidarity. We reject managerial efforts, under whatever name, which
jeopardize workers- rights, undermine workplace conditions and erode the
independence of the union.
[Moreover] the fight against the management agenda in the workplace does not
exist apart from the larger fight against the business agenda in our society.
As we mobilize against regressive taxation, the weakening of UI, or plant
closure legislation, we are reminding our members that the -team- they are on
is not the same team as their employer, and that the -adversary- is not the
other workers but those who are on the other side of these issues.

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