Canadian Auto Workers
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| Full name | National Automobile, Aerospace, Transportation and General Workers Union of Canada |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1985 |
| Date dissolved | 2013 |
| Merged into | Unifor |
| Members | 190,000 |
| Affiliation | CLC, IMF, ITF |
| Key people | Ken Lewenza (Pres.) |
| Office location | 205 Placer Court, Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Country | Canada |
The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW; formally the National Automobile, Aerospace, Transportation and General Workers Union of Canada) was one of Canada's largest and highest profile labour unions. In 2013 it merged with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, forming a new union, Unifor. While rooted in Ontario's large auto plants of Windsor, Brampton, Oakville, St. Catharines and Oshawa, the CAW has expanded and now incorporates workers in almost every sector of the economy. The presidents of the CAW were Bob White (1985-1992), Buzz Hargrove (1992-2008) and Ken Lewenza (2008-2013).
The CAW began as the Canadian Region of the United Auto Workers (UAW).
The UAW was founded in August 1935, and the Canadian Region of the UAW was established in 1937 following the 1937 GM Oshawa strike at General Motors's Oshawa, Ontario plant. The Canadian Region of the UAW unionized the Ford Motor Company in 1945 after a major strike which established the right of Canadian labour union members to union dues checkoff.
The reasons for the CAW split from the UAW are complicated. Holmes and Rusonik (1990) contend that although the Canadian labour movement has been seen as traditionally more militant than its American counterpart, it was in fact the uneven geographical development of both management and labour led the Canadian auto-workers to develop a distinctly different set of collective bargaining objectives, which placed them in a far stronger bargaining position as compared to the UAW in the U.S., and, ultimately, brought about the events that led directly to the Split. Two of the main forces demanding the restructuring of management and Labour during this time were the rise of Japan as a major automotive force, and the general recession of the world economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Aided by the Auto Pact and the weakening Canadian dollar in relation to the United States dollar, a geographic difference developed which provided some relief to many Canadian auto-workers.
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