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The Canadian Auto Workers union, the CAW, has a long and rich history. Part of the U.S.-based United Auto Workers for almost fifty years, the CAW separated from its American parent in 1985. Today, the Canadian Auto Workers union encompasses members from a broad range of industries. It is also one of the most powerful unions in the country. Yet few people know the union's history, how it acquired its strength, or what accounts for its split with its American parent. This illustrated history provides a fascinating look at the union from its origins to the present. Beginning in the twenties, Sam Gindin describes the early years of the automobile industry and the emergence of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. He looks at the birth of the UAW in 1936, the conflicts that rocked the union in the fifties, the signing of theAutopact in the sixties, and the historic split of the Canadian section from the UAW two decades later. Finally, he considers the issues facing the union and the Canadian labour movement as the century draws to a close. By providing a profile of the CAW as well as the labour and social movements that it helped shape, The Canadian Auto Workers offers us something unusual — an engrossing glimpse of our past, written from a union perspective. --Publisher's description

Critiques the political response of unions to the neoliberalism of Canada since the mid-1970s, and sets out steps for building an alternative, socialist Left.

The Ontario labour movement is in deep crisis, and has been staggering since the end of the 1990s. Given the labour movement’s historic role in leading and supporting progressive change, its current disorientation should be a matter of alarm to its members of course, but also to anyone concerned with countering the insatiable greed and social destructiveness of capitalism. --Introduction

From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers, this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights and standards of living. The fourth edition witnesses the passing of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada--an era in which the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers and unions to act as subordinates in Canada's capitalist democracy. It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion--on force and on fear--to secure that subordination. From Consent to Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing socialist politics--of thinking ambitiously and meeting new challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy. -- Publisher's description

On November 26, 2018, General Motors announced a number of plant closures in North America, the largest of which was in Oshawa, Ontario. The Oshawa facility, once the largest auto complex on the continent, was to end all its assembly operations by the end of 2019. ...This pamphlet provides background material on Oshawa and joins Green Jobs Oshawa in encouraging workers elsewhere to prepare now for the threats to their jobs and productive capacity that will inevitably come. --From introduction. Contents: Introduction: Realizing ‘Just Transitions’: The Struggle for Plant Conversion at GM Oshawa -- Mission Statement of Green Jobs Oshawa -- Unifor Settlement with GM – Footprint or Toe Tag? / Tony Leah -- GM Oshawa: Lowered Expectations Unexplored Opportunities; The GM Strike and the Historical Convergence of Possibilities / Sam Gindin -- Bringing SNC-Lavalin to Mind During an Uninspiring Federal Election / Leo Panitch -- Take It Over: The Struggle for Green Production in Oshawa / Linda McQuaig -- Green Jobs Oshawa and a Just Transition / Rebecca Keetch -- Why GM’s Oshawa Assembly Line Shutdown is a Black Eye for Unifor’s Jerry Dias / Jennifer Wells -- Appendix: Feasibility Study for the Green Conversion of the GM Oshawa Facility: Possibilities for Sustainable Community Wealth: Summary Overview / Russ Christianson. Contents: Introduction: Realizing ‘Just Transitions’: The Struggle for Plant Conversion at GM Oshawa -- Mission Statement of Green Jobs Oshawa -- Unifor Settlement with GM – Footprint or Toe Tag? / Tony Leah -- GM Oshawa: Lowered Expectations Unexplored Opportunities; The GM Strike and the Historical Convergence of Possibilities / Sam Gindin -- Bringing SNC-Lavalin to Mind During an Uninspiring Federal Election / Leo Panitch -- Take It Over: The Struggle for Green Production in Oshawa / Linda McQuaig -- Green Jobs Oshawa and a Just Transition / Rebecca Keetch -- Why GM’s Oshawa Assembly Line Shutdown is a Black Eye for Unifor’s Jerry Dias / Jennifer Wells -- Appendix: Feasibility Study for the Green Conversion of the GM Oshawa Facility: Possibilities for Sustainable Community Wealth: Summary Overview / Russ Christianson.

The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America’s leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer’s work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures. Dissenting Traditions gathers Palmer’s contemporaries, students, and sometimes critics to examine and expand on the topics and themes that have defined Palmer’s career, from labour history to Marxism and communist politics. Paying attention to Palmer’s participation in key debates, contributors demonstrate that class analysis, labour history, building institutions, and engaging the public are vital for social change. In this moment of increasing precarity and growing class inequality, Palmer’s politically engaged scholarship offers a useful roadmap for scholars and activists alike and underlines the importance of working-class history. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction / Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith -- Part I. Labour. Bryan D. Palmer, Labour historian / Alvin Finkel -- Bryan D. Palmer, social historian / Ted McCoy -- Labour history’s present: An account of Labour/Le Travail under Bryan D. Palmer / Kirk Niergarth. Part 2. Experience, discourse, class. Bryan D. Palmer and E. P. Thompson / Nicholas Rogers -- On polemics and provocations: Bryan D. Palmer vs. liberal anti-Marxists / Chad Pearson -- Bryan Douglas Palmer, Edward Palmer Thompson, John le Carré (and me): Workers, spies, and spying, past and present / Gregory S. Kealey. Part 3. Politics. Palmer’s politics: Discovering the past and the future of class struggle / Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin -- The hippopotamus and the giraffe: Bolshevism, Stalinism, and American and British Communism in the 1920s / John McIlroy and Alan Campbell -- The June days of 2013 in Brazil and the persistence of top-down histories / Sean Purdy -- Old positions/new directions: Strategies for rebuilding Canadian working-class history / Sean Carleton and Julia Smith -- Afterword: Rude awakenings / Bryan D. Palmer -- Selected Works of Bryan D. Palmer -- List of contributors.