Hard Times, Hard Bargains: The Politics of the Canadian Autoworkers During Fiscal and Political Crises
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The CAW came into being in 1985 from the breakaway Canadian arm of the UAW. Ever since their origins in the 1984 negotiations with the Big Three automakers, the CAW styled itself as a union that would bargain under the axiom, “No Concessions”, distinguishing them from the concessionary UAW. Away from the bargaining table, the CAW has situated itself broadly on the left of the political spectrum, and has actively supported the NDP at the Federal and provincial levels in Anglophone Canada. At times, the CAW has criticized the NDP for not being sufficiently left-wing.Recently the CAW has undergone major changes in their politics, in bargaining and elsewhere. The CAW dropped support for the NDP in favour of strategic voting, severed all formal ties to the NDP, and then publicly endorsed the Liberal Party of Canada. During the 2009 economic crisis, the CAW acquiesced to massive concessions, under pressure from both corporations and governments, to secure the future of auto manufacturing in Canada.Our paper situates CAW decisions within the context of the pressures that neoliberalism has exerted on organized labour (arguably experiencing “hard times” in Canada since the early 1980s), which have increased exponentially during the last 24 months. We argue that the CAW has shifted from fighting against neoliberal reforms to fighting for the union’s very survival. The paper uses the 2008-09 round of collective bargaining as the central case, as it exemplifies how the CAW has responded to both the “hard times” of the current fiscal crisis and the greater “hard times” of neoliberal reform.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.059 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".