It’s worth mentioning that Lewenza and his nemesis, Tom LaSorda, have deep roots in Windsor. Both were born there in 1954. Both were raised in big families — Lewenza was one of eight children, LaSorda one of nine — with strong ties to the labour movement. LaSorda’s father and grandfather were presidents of their union locals, making LaSorda the first child of a union leader to head up one of the Big Three. Lewenza, meanwhile, was a Local 444 member and union steward back when the chapter was led by LaSorda’s father. He ran 444 himself from 1994 to 2008, before succeeding Buzz Hargrove as the caw’s national president. Now, months later, he was fighting LaSorda, not only for the survival of the union, but to protect a way of life in the city they both called their hometown.

The crowd cheered Lewenza’s speech, as it was supposed to. Few noticed that he had avoided mentioning the terms of the new deal. Nor did he and other union leaders permit Melo and his fellow workers to vote on whether to accept it. In fact, the Aramco workers didn’t find out what Chrysler had offered until the company had safely retrieved its tooling. Only then did the unionists learn that the new offer totalled just $400,000, twice the original offer but less than a third of the approximately $1.5 million the union believed its members deserved. In the end, the payout gave employees a severance package of about $5,000 each. The caw claimed fighting back had made a difference.

Then came the pile-on. By mid-March, most of the components of Chrysler’s eventual bailout were in place. After a two-year, globe-spanning fishing trip, LaSorda had landed a tentative merger with Fiat SpA, the Italian automaker run by ceo Sergio Marchionne, a graduate of the University of Windsor’s business school. Public discussion about the gap in employee costs between the unionized Big Three and their non-union, foreign-owned counterparts gained further focus when US president Barack Obama entered the fray.

On March 30, Obama committed to spending billions on assistance for Chrysler and GM, on the condition that they negotiate deals with the unions that would bring about wage parity with foreign-owned North American manufacturers. An hour later, Canada’s industry minister, Tony Clement, imposed the same conditions in exchange for further funding from the Canadian and Ontario governments. On April 15, the Globe and Mail’s European business correspondent, Eric Reguly, published an interview with Marchionne from Fiat’s headquarters in Turin. The Chrysler-Fiat deal would evaporate, Marchionne told Reguly, if Canadian auto workers didn’t agree to match the lower labour costs of the foreign automakers. As though the point needed any more emphasis, LaSorda and his American boss, Bob Nardelli, sent a letter to Chrysler’s Canadian workers on April 17 warning of dire consequences if an agreement wasn’t reached.

The script was the same as it had been thirty years ago when Iacocca was running the show. But this time, the Canadian auto workers could muster only a feeble response:
references to the threats as “blackmail,” and the odd, impromptu parking lot bonfire. The caw had no effective answer to the anti-union posturing. The single most significant act of protest during these historic bargaining sessions was Mike Melo’s twenty-two-hour occupation of a Windsor stamping plant.

“It didn’t seem to me that there was a strategy,” says James Winter, a professor of communications at the University of Windsor and a long-time union observer. “It seemed as if the caw leadership was reacting reflexively to events.” He mentions a study released in mid-April by caw economist Jim Stanford showing that Chrysler and GM’s Canadian operations generated after-tax profits of approximately $36.7 billion between 1972 and 2007. “This should have been a huge ‘Where’s the beef?’ campaign,” says Winter. “They needed TV and radio spots. Instead, it was a one-day news story.”

One of the few union figures who displayed any will to fight was retired. Buzz Hargrove, the caw’s president from 1992 to 2008, had left the job just months before the economy imploded. One afternoon in mid-April, he bought me a coffee at Toronto’s Sutton Place Hotel. “It’s a charade,” he said of Chrysler’s threat to pull out of the country. “It’s absurd. [LaSorda] doesn’t have enough money to run the company, and he’s gonna close two of his most profitable plants? Spend hundreds of millions of dollars on severance payments and early retirements under our contracts? And then spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a new workforce and set up in the US? The whole thing is illogical. And Mr. Marchionne, the same thing. He doesn’t even know what the labour costs are in Canada. He doesn’t have a fucking clue what’s going on. It’s all part of a charade to try to force the union into giving major
concessions and to undermine the credibility of the union.”

With a government-imposed April 30 deadline looming, the final bargaining session began at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre hotel. On April 24, Chrysler and the caw reached an agreement. The new contract gave Chrysler, Fiat, and both the Canadian and American governments everything they’d requested. The union managed to escape cuts to real wages and pensions. The agreement extended to six years from three the time it would take new hires to reach the full wage of approximately $33 an hour. The annual Christmas bonus of $1,700 was toast. Health care coverage no longer provided semi-private hospital beds, and employees would be required to pay $30 a month to the plan. In addition, cuts were made to the Dependent Children Scholarship program and a tuition refund program, along with dozens of other smaller incisions. According to figures from official sources, the cuts saved the company $240 million annually, or about $19 an hour, bringing Chrysler’s labour costs down from about $76 to $57 an hour — a reduction of 25 percent. In both percentage and absolute terms, the concessions are the largest in caw history, bringing Chrysler’s labour costs in line with those at Honda and Toyota. Soon after the agreement was announced, the union offered up similar concessions to General Motors — again, with virtually no public protest. The industry custom of pattern bargaining suggests that Ford will seek the same treatment.

Sam Gindin, the union’s director of research under Bob White and Buzz Hargrove and now a visiting chair in York University’s political science department, was dismayed by the way the negotiations proceeded. “There’ll be long-term consequences,” he says. “This profoundly weakens the union. It’s a turning point; they’ve broken the spirit of the union.”

Several weeks after the blockade ended, I met with Mike Melo at a Windsor watering hole. He hadn’t yet received his severance but was expecting it any day. I asked whether he resented the union for not disclosing the details of the agreement to the workers who staged the blockade. No, he said glumly. “It’s better than we were going to get initially. It was the best we were going to get.” The mood was similarly resigned at the University of Windsor phys. ed. centre on April 26, when some 2,500 members of Local 444 voted on the concessions. No one tipped over any cars or threw any eggs. No one hung anyone in effigy. The only expression of outrage I saw was a worker with a facsimile of a handgun wired to his baseball cap, the barrel pointed at his temple.

Eighty-seven percent of the caw’s workers ratified the Chrysler contract. The formerly militant Local 444 came in at an even more acquiescent 90.3 percent. It seemed like a dispirited showing, but then times have changed. With 225,000 members, the caw is a larger and more diverse body than it was in the early ’80s. Decades of gains have domesticated its rank and file, making today’s auto workers far more inclined toward conservatism than during the age of Bob White.

Some still long for the old days. “Our union has preached the gospel against concessions since the ’80s,” says Willie Lambert, a union rep in Oakville’s Local 1256 who gained notoriety when he positioned himself as an alternative to Hargrove in 2006. “We were told that and told that and told that — one concession begets another. Now we’re supposed to believe the world has changed.

“Fighting back makes a difference,” he continues. “That’s what they used to say. What happened to fighting back? We’ve been falling back. Our leadership doesn’t want to fight back. The leadership today is more worried about people like Sam Gindin speaking out than about concessions. If we had the leadership now that we had thirty years ago, we would be marching. We would be mobilizing. Bob White knew he had to kick ass. He understood. But today, we as a union have not been prepared to fight the good fight.”

Lewenza disagrees. He argues that an absence of political support left the caw without options. The implication is that even if the union had organized widespread labour disruptions the protest would have been fruitless. “In ‘79 and ‘80, we lost $1.15 right out of our pocket,” he said at the Local 444 ratification meeting in Windsor. “We lost our personal paid holidays. At the end of the day, what did we say to our members? Let’s fight another day, and we will get those things back. And over ten or fifteen years, we fought and gained them back.” But what motivated those gains was the anger of the rank and file, and today that anger doesn’t exist. Since the union agreed without public protest to the largest concessions in its history, it seems unlikely that the caw can reinspire the righteous anger that won its recently surrendered gains.

None of this bodes well for the Windsor that was. During my last trip to the area, I stood on the shores of the Detroit River, dressed in a tuxedo for my brother-in-law’s wedding. During the ceremony, freighters passed behind us. Pleasure craft zoomed ahead of wakes. The groom, a supervisor for a logistics company, worked out of Chrysler’s Windsor Assembly Plant. The best man, a machinist for a tool and die supplier, was in for the week from Alabama, where he’d been forced to move to find work. My other brother-in-law, a sheet metal foreman, once made his living in the plants; now the only work he could find entailed a six-hour commute to and from North Bay each week. Despite how the auto economy had affected everyone’s fortunes, the ceremony was a beautiful, bucolic occasion. I looked around at my friends and family, at generations past and future, and felt fortunate to have grown up where and when I did. It was good while it lasted.