Workers at Daimler-Chrysler, like their sisters and brothers at Ford Canada, have overwhelmingly endorsed the contract negotiated for them by the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW).
With wage increases of 13.5 percent over three years, substantial improvements to pensions and benefits, it is seen by most as a very good contract.
But the business press is gloating that CAW president Buzz Hargrove, not Daimler-Chrysler, was the one to back down.
Hargrove insisted until the eleventh-hour that he would call on his members to strike unless management agreed to pressure one of its major part suppliers, Magna International, to stop blocking CAW from organizing at its plants.
The press gleefully quoted Chrysler workers who said they were unsure it was worthwhile to strike on such an issue, and condemned Hargrove for trying to link two "different issues."
Let's see -- just who is linking these issues together? Magna has grown from nothing to a company with 15,000 workers in Canada alone.
It has been the beneficiary of a years-long policy of the Big Three North American car companies, of contracting out as much work as they could get away with, from unionized plants to non-union plants like Magna's.
It is the union-busters at Ford, Chrysler and GM who have linked these issues, not the CAW.
But if Hargrove was right to link the issues, his top-down approach got him into real trouble.
What kind of a message does it send to workers when the head of the union approaches organizing the unorganized as a matter for discussion between the union leaders and management?
Had Hargrove been serious about pulling his members on strike over this issue, it would have demanded serious organizing on the ground to build solidarity.
Plant gate meetings with Magna workers involved in union drives, information pickets, mass leafleting -- all of this could have laid the basis for a strike to unionize the parts plants.
The CAW has signed up more than 50 percent of the workers at Magna owned Integram seating in Windsor.
If Magna is playing hardball with this drive, then the way to respond in kind is not through negotiations at the top, but action at the bottom.
The CAW leadership could tell Daimler-Chrysler workers to refuse to handle any products from Integram until Magna becomes more cooperative. Both Magna and Daimler-Chrysler would suddenly be all ears.
The shopfloor is where the power lies, not the board-rooms of the negotiators.