Sit-down victory

Striking Collins & Aikman workers, April 1. Photo: CAW

After a two-day occupation of a plant near Toronto, Canada, a small local of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) has won a victory against one of the largest U.S. auto parts suppliers.

When Collins & Aikman declared bankruptcy in May 2005, the company, based in Southfield, Mich., had over 23,000 employees. After closings, layoffs and spinoffs, there are now only 14,000 workers in 45 facilities, producing carpeting and acoustics for the worldwide automotive industry. Among additional plants slated to be shuttered is a factory in Scarborough, Ont.

When it appeared the closing there was a done deal, the CAW negotiated severance packages to help the workers through hard times. When the company appeared to be shutting down early without compensation, workers swung into action. On March 31 about 100 union members stopped production and occupied the plant, while a few hundred more picketed and congregated outside.

The strike shut down the Brampton, Ont., Chrysler plant, which produces the high-end 300 series vehicles.

The sit-down, a first in a U.S. or Canadian plant in a long time, was a page out of labor history. Exactly 70 years after Flint auto workers ignited a wave of workplace occupations, the bosses’ fear of seizures reasserted itself.

Mustaq Mohammed, chairperson of Local 303 of the Canadian Auto Workers union, said the union had “inside information” that the company planned to remove equipment from the plant on April 1, meaning the factory would close three months before the July date the company had given the workers in negotiations.

That’s when the workers and union officials took over the plant in a 4:30 a.m. action, welding doors closed and barricading windows. Hundreds of other union members held a solidarity picket outside. (Scarborough Mirror, April 3)

When word spread of the sit-down, auto workers at the Guelph, Ont., Collins & Aikman plant went on a wildcat strike in support. When the Guelph workers walked out, management barricaded the turnstile entrances with chains and steel bars so they couldn’t re-enter and sit-in at that plant.

Auto workers at Ingersoll and Oshawa plants, also in Ontario, said that they’d shut down production on Monday, April 2, in a show of solidarity.

By the end of the day on April 1, with the threat of spreading solidarity actions, Collins & Aikman—with a pledge to help from Chrysler—agreed to make the severance payments.

Up until a few days before the 2005 bankruptcy was declared, Collins & Aikman was headed up by David Stockman, architect of the supply side theory behind Reaganomics. But as Marxists know, profits don’t trickle down. Workers have to fight for everything and fight again to keep it. If this sit-down and the sit-down of Delphi workers in Spain become a trend, the tide might begin to turn against concessions and demoralization.