Caterpillar management is becoming the guru of work-place reorganization and Pat Buchanan by David Finkel By March 7 the contest was over: Senator Bob Dole will be the Republican nominee to face Bill Clinton in the November presidential election. To be sure, there remain numerous state primary elections and the party conventions to come — the United States is probably the only country with a presidential campaign lasting longer than the Stanley Cup playoffs. The real story of the Republican primary season, however, isn't Dole's victory but the ascendance of one of his defeated rivals, Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan, long-time conservative columnist, television personality and a speechwriter for the Nixon and Reagan administrations, for several weeks terrorized the Republican party elites with the specter of winning enough delegates to force a multiballot or brokered convention. While it's now clear that this won't happen, Buchanan still might win enough delegates to force floor fights over abortion or immigration, or to gain prime-time coverage as he did in 1992 for his speech demanding "cultural war" against homosexuals and non-European Christian values. In a rare display of ruling class anxiety, the March 4 issue of Time was largely devoted to a Buchanan-bashing spread, exposing the dangers of his opposition to free trade and his crude brand of racism. The reactionary prejudices to which Buchanan appeals are profoundly useful to bourgeois political elites, of course, so long as they are kept in the shadows and delivered in code. Not when they are starkly presented, and linked to a quasi-populist rhetoric about corporate greed, falling wages and downsizing. Roughly speaking, Buchanan combines the least savory features of Canada's Reform Party chief Preston Manning with the ethos of France's Jean-Marie Le Pen and Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky. His political project is to bring together the grievances of working-class victims of economic globalization with the religious right and elements of the "Patriot" (militia and whitesupremacist) movements. In this sense he accurately reflects the political excrescence of the past decade: the rise of right-wing ideology and the decay of the labor movement. Nonetheless, these elements are an uneasy amalgamation. Buchanan's long-time flirtations with anti-semitism make him highly attractive to elements on the fringes of neonazism and the Ku Klux Klan. But they have to be deeply hidden from the evangelical Christian right, which for its own messianic reasons is fanatically pro-Zionist. And while appealing to working class concerns, Buchanan must try to conceal his longtime hostility to unions. These contradictions partially explain the fanatical zeal with which Buchanan attacks abortion rights and gays: convenient targets for fundamentalists and Aryan Nations types alike. Yet the Republican elites understand that such a frontal attack on abortion is the sure road to national electoral defeat. This made it all the more important for the Republican leadership to defeat Buchanan first. Thus, only after on March 6, after it had become clear that Buchanan's momentum had been checked, did one leading Republican ideologue, Jack Kemp, come out in support of another of Dole's rivals, Steve Forbes, who is attempting to revive Reagan-era "supply-side" economics and a "flat tax" that would give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax relief to wealthy Americans. Kemp would not have made such an endorsement at a time when it might have fatally weakened Dole and opened the door for Buchanan. For their part, Democratic Party liberals seem determined to ignore the lessons and the warning that Buchanan's appeal holds. No one challenged Bill Clinton from the left in the Democratic primaries, aside from the Winnipeg professor who briefly campaigned in New Hampshire. The issues of massive layoffs in the face of rising corporate profits, of unfair taxation and declining living standards — issues that normally and naturally belong to the left - have been effectively hijacked by a crypto-fascist because the left remained silent about them. Rallying around Clinton, the Democrats will probably hold the White House against a lackluster and vacuous Bob Dole in November. In any case, the differences between these candidates will be the smallest since the Carter-Ford contest in 1976. Yet the politics of Buchanan, amalgamating racism, misogyny and false promises to the working class, are likely to continue gaining ground -just as they are in Canada, in Europe, the former USSR and elsewhere, and for the same fundamental reasons.*
The author is a leading member of the US organization Solidarity
union humiliation. Following the end of the first strike in 1992, the "Wall Street Journal" reported, CAT called together a meeting of managers from other construction, farm implement, and auto companies. The topic was breaking pattern bargaining.
Ontario by Julia Barnett
Activists in Canada followed media coverage of the recent French strikes with great enthusiasm. On December 11th, 10,000 of us found ourselves in the streets of London, Ontario in below zero weather on a one day strike called by the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), "Hey Mike, hey Harris, we'll shut you down like Paris!". The current wave of strike action in Ontario and the many planned mobilizations to come are a result of a political/economic course which began in the mid 1970's under the Federal Liberal Party government. Within a Canadian context this meant the movement to control the public sector and slashing the social welfare state as Canadians knew it to be since World War II. Today in Ontario under the Tory government led by Premier Mike Harris this dismantling is occurring at an unprecedented speed.
The 1980's Federal Tory government led by Brian Mulroney marked a major shift in the strategy of Canadian business, which demanded a comprehensive attack on the social welfare state. The Tories' main accomplishments were the severe cutting of federal transfer paymentsto provinces' social programs. The Tories also paved the way for cuts to unemployment insurance benefits and eligibility, tax cuts, low interest loans and handouts to private corporations.
The international Neo-Liberal agenda is transforming the highly decentralized Canadian State (the ten provinces [1] and two territories are directly responsible for health care, education, social welfare and labour relations).
The Federal government in the 1980's took the lead in the neoliberal offensive but didn't have control over all the provincial governments. The New Democratic Party (NDP)[2] had control in the two most industrialized, populated and richest in resource provinces. In Ontario the entire labour movement endorsed the NDP and to all (especially the NDP) their victory was a great surprise. At the time in Ontario the
Today, in the wake of its victory
Caterpillar appears to be on the prowl again.
One of its executives showed up at the
Three Rivers, Michigan plant of American
Gear & Axle, an operation that General
Motors sold to private investors in 1994.
The company is still a GM supplier. 's Labour
Labour leadership had no criticisms of the
NDP, nor did it generate a political analysis or debate on how to relate to the NDP once in power. The same held true for most of the social movements. A few organizations did put pressure on the NDP government, including the Ontario Coalition For Abortion Clinics (OCAC) [3] who demonstrated to demand further funding for free standing abortion clinics throughout the province. But social movements including feminists and the labour movement (some of OCAC's key allies in the fight for abortion rights) harshly criticized OCAC for demonstrating against the NDP and for criticizing the "voice of working people".
Two years into office the Ontario NDP imposed public sector rollbacks that even the Federal Tories wouldn't try. The Social Contract included wage freezes, mandatory unpaid leaves and the paving of the way for thousands of public sector jobs to be eliminated. NDP governments in Saskatchewan and British Columbia announced similar policies.
While the NDP provincially was introducing some of the worst austerity measures in years, the Liberals came back to power at the Federal level, with the pretence of making the federal deficit the number one issue of the day. The North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) was passed during this time, while in Quebec, the Parti Quebecois (PQ) re-opened the National Question.
After the defeat of the NDP in Ontario's last election, Conservative Premier Mike Harris openly declared a zero deficit goal, 30% reduction in taxes, pro-workfare, etc... in the name of a "Common Sense Revolution" — Ontario's own Newt Gingrichification.
Since Harris' on June 8, 1995 we have seen more movement and opposition to government policies than in the previous decades. June 28, 1995, the day Harris's cabinet was sworn in, 1,000 people demonstrated at the legislature. One month later 3,000 welfare activists stood at the
Canada *
It may be that the Big Three auto makers won't go as far in bargaining next year as
CAT did, and suppliers like American Gear & Axle may not yet be ready for a confrontation. But Caterpillar's agents are out there encouraging their colleagues. Labor should take note and do the same. * Upsurge same place protesting 21% cuts in their welfare payments. On September 27 more than 5,000 returned to Queens Park to mark the reopening of the legislature. Similar demonstrations took place throughout the Province. This was the first of many demonstrations where police began using batons to beat demonstrators. Wherever Harris goes in Ontario there are demonstrators and/or protest actions.
This is all taking place with a divided labour leadership, fragmented and small organized left and for the most part single issued social movements. The Ontario Federation of Labour at it's November convention rallied against the Harris government Bill 7, the new Tory "right to work" legislation that replaced the NDP's labour law. On December 11th a one day strike in London, Ontario was called by the OFL. On January 13, 37,000 Catholic school teachers and supporters marched on the legislature — the largest demonstration at Queen's Park in half a century. February 6 was a National Student Day of Protest organized across universities. Demonstrations were held to protest against the cuts to federal transfer payments for education and against tuition hikes. In Toronto 1,200 students held a sit-in at the legislature. The result was the arrest of four students charged with the draconian old "intimidating the legislature" law, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment. Polls showed that public support for Harris had shrunk from close to 60% in the summer, to 37%.
Meanwhile the Ontario Labour Leadership has not been willing or able to mobilize against the architects of NAFTA, Neo-Liberalism, or even examine the real divisions between organised labour and the NDP. This is due in part to it's 1960's model of "Business Unionism" and partly to its blanket support of electoralist strategies for the NDP every four years.
Five big "Pink Slip" unions [4] disagreed with the OL's decision to break with the NDP after the Social Contract.
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