On the surface, it seems like a surprising split for two powerful unions with decades of shared history and interests.
The United Auto Workers, or UAW, representing thousands of American auto workers, has thrown itself behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Canada and Mexico.
“We are glad to see an American president take aggressive action on ending the free trade disaster that has dropped like a bomb on the working class,” the union said recently.
It’s a sharply different position than the union’s Canadian counterpart, which has denounced the tariffs and called the UAW’s stance “naive,” given the impact experts say tariffs will have on the auto industry and U.S. autoworkers.
“To think that Canada could just suffer and eat up these kinds of tariffs and it not to have an impact is completely naive in my opinion,” Unifor National President Lana Payne said Thursday.
Labour and automotive experts say tariffs are very unlikely to bring legions of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., citing the potentially devastating damage to the North American auto sector’s deeply integrated supply chains.
Regardless, experts say the UAW’s position is emblematic of decades of job losses, shifting politics and new leadership.
“U.S. auto workers have not had a great three decades,” said Wayne Lewchuk, professor emeritus in the School of Labour Studies and Department of Economics at McMaster University.
“They’ve lost a lot of jobs, they have lost a lot of salary, they’ve lost a lot of benefits.”
The split is also remarkable when you consider that the two unions used to be one. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Canadian autoworkers broke off from the UAW to form their own union: the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), which eventually became Unifor.
“It’s a very, very serious breach of international solidarity because it’s an acceptance, almost, of some of the ideological B.S. that’s coming from Trump,” said Herman Rosenfeld, a retired CAW staffer who worked in the union’s education department for 15 years.
Payne said there have been discussions at the staff level between unions about the UAW’s stance on tariffs, and that the Canadian side is “not shy about making [its] position known.”
Many of Unifor’s leaders, who met last week in London, Ont., to discuss the ongoing tariff threat, have also “expressed their anger with” the UAW’s position, Payne said.
The UAW did not respond to repeated interview requests.
But it’s not the first time tensions have bubbled up between the unions, the experts said. In fact, past tensions are the reason why the unions splintered in the first place.
A shared history
In the early days, autoworkers in Canada and the U.S. were both represented by the UAW, which formed during the 1930s amid a broader push to unionize industrial workers.
The UAW’s Canadian regional office, as it was called, grew out of Windsor, Ont., still known as Canada’s automotive capital.
“From the beginning, the UAW was an international union, but there were always tensions, and the tensions had to do with, ‘This is a different country’,” said Rosenfeld, who now writes about labour issues and politics from a socialist perspective.
For one, the Canadian side of the union had a more militant reputation, which some research attributes in part to the lack of collective bargaining rights in Canada until the mid-1940s.
WATCH: Residents in Windsor, Ont., are bracing for possible tariffs. Just across the border, Americans are, too.
While U.S. President Donald Trump this week paused a host of tariffs on Canadian goods and auto for 30 days, the episode had had residents in Windsor bracing for the possible impact on a border city economy that depends on automotive and manufacturing jobs. The CBC’s Jacob Barker went to Sterling Heights, Mich., where Ford and Stellantis, two major employers in Windsor, also have plants, to hear what residents there are thinking this week.
Other differences arose over the years, but the unions also fed off of each others’ victories, securing additional rights and benefits for their memberships.
Tensions swelled in the 1980s amid a growing debate over strategy, when the American leadership of the union shifted toward a less aggressive position while the Canadian side wanted to maintain firm pressure on the auto companies.
Rosenfeld called this the start of the era of “concession bargaining,” when the American wing of the union, seeing competition from the Japanese auto industry, accepted concessions for promises of job security.
“It was seen as a fundamental change, and here in Canada, we rejected that,” he said.
It was ultimately this difference in opinion that drove the creation of the Canadian Auto Workers by the mid-1980s.
The North American Free Trade Agreement of the early 1990s provided fresh opportunities for tension between the two unions, Rosenfeld and Lewchuk said, by forcing workers in the U.S., Canada and now Mexico to compete against each other for work.
Drawn to its cheaper labour, automotive manufacturers shifted some production south to Mexico, leading to job losses in the heavily unionized Rust Belt, while advancements in automation and robotics replaced people on assembly lines.
UAW membership now sits at just under 400,000, a sharp decline from its peak of 1.5 million in the ’70s.
Big changes at the UAW
In recent years, several UAW union leaders were convicted in corruption cases that included bribes from auto union executives and embezzlement of union funds.
It was in the fallout of that scandal that the union changed its rules to give the rank and file more say in who becomes president. Each member now gets a vote, instead of a smaller group of officials electing the leader.
The result was the election of Shawn Fain.
Under his leadership, the UAW launched a historic simultaneous strike against the Big Three automakers in 2023, securing new contracts with sizable pay increases for members.
Fain also wielded significant power during the 2024 presidential race, ultimately throwing the union’s support behind Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
But Harris lost, particularly in traditionally Democratic strongholds like Michigan, where thousands of autoworkers live.
America’s shifting politics
As job losses continued to mount after the 2008 financial crisis, blue collar workers who were historically reliable Democratic voters started to shift to the right – a shift that resulted in the partial collapse of the “Blue Wall” during Trump’s first presidential win in 2016, and again last year.
His campaign promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the American midwest have resonated with autoworkers in swing states like Michigan, which remains the country’s automotive capital.
“A lot of workers were sick and tired, and they were looking for some kind of alternative, even if it’s a terrible right wing alternative,” said Rosenfeld.
“I’m just assuming that the leader of the UAW is cognizant of a lot of his members’ perspectives on this.”
Still, Peter Frise, an automotive industry expert at the University of Windsor, said it’s unclear exactly why the UAW has come out in favour of tariffs.
“It’s a little puzzling to see the UAW aligning itself with far-right Republican policy and sort of throwing their union brethren under the bus,” Frise said. “But I guess you have to look at it from several different ways.”
Fair trade, not free trade: Unifor
Lewchuk, the McMaster professor, says the UAW’s position to support Trump’s tariffs should be seen less as anti-Canada, and more “as a way of breaking the free trade paradigm,” which “has not served workers anywhere.”
The UAW in its March 4 statement said the manufacturers should bear the brunt of tariffs. “The working class suffered all the pain of NAFTA, and we won’t suffer all the pain of undoing NAFTA,” their statement reads.
Frise, whose background is in engineering, argues that free trade has been good for the continent, saying the agreements of the past few decades “have been absolutely incredible at bringing stability, prosperity and good things to the North American marketplace.”
“There’s no question about it … there have been problems and some people have gotten hurt,” he said. “But in the main, for the large swath of North American industry and North American workers, free trade has been exactly the right thing.”
Frise and other industry experts have repeatedly noted that trying to disentangle the deeply interconnected supply chains would imperil both economies.
“It would take years to do that, many years and cost countless hundreds of billions of dollars,” Frise said.
Frise also said the manufacturers don’t have the profit margins to absorb tariffs at 25 per cent or more – especially since parts can cross the border several times before the car is finally assembled.
At a certain point – some say it could be a matter of days – that cost becomes too much for the companies, especially smaller parts suppliers, leading to plant closures and job losses.
Unifor says it would like to see issues hammered out during the mandated renegotiations of the USMCA – NAFTA’s successor that was signed during Trump’s first term – next year.
Payne, the union’s president, said she would like to focus on “fair” trade rather than free trade.
“If that is your lens, then you will get a trade agreement that lifts the living standards of workers,” she said.
“I agree with the UAW, that is not what we got out of many of these trade agreements. But the reality is, that trade will still happen. So how do we make sure that that works for working people?”
Lewchuk and Rosenfeld expressed support for “managed” trade agreements, such as the original Auto Pact between Canada and the U.S. in the 1960s.
Rosenfeld says he would also like to see Canada move away from its closely intertwined economic relationship with the U.S. where possible.
Lewchuk said “the real problem in the United States, to be frank, is the increasing inequality of distribution of what’s produced.”
“The rich have made out like bandits in the United States, and they’ve left everyone else behind,” he said. “I’m not seeing Trump reversing that trend.
But there is a reason for optimism, he says.
“We’re at a moment where things are coming unraveled, and that’s the moment when you can make progress,” he said.