Buzz Hargrove Quotes (56 Quotes)

We thought this would be a lot easier than it's turned out to be,

After some tough negotiations we have reached a tentative agreement. This has been a very difficult and challenging set of negotiations with General Motors and of course we anticipated that.

He says it's much more costly for them to do the same thing and he wanted to be absolutely clear that that's not acceptable and that we have to find a way to deal with that in bargaining.

Every member of our union realizes it's not business as usual anymore.

The CAW remains committed to strengthening working class politics and we will expand our financial support and efforts to work with other like-minded groups in our common goal of building a progressive alternative in our country.

I'm not very optimistic at this point, ... The big thing is the demand on jobs that they have, on outsourcing our jobs ... to anywhere in the world that can do it cheaper.

We're not going to come out of this without some pain.

The company was honest and frank with us, and together we were able to address those challenges in a manner that clearly satisfied our members.

Ford has asked me for an early morning meeting tomorrow, which indicates to me they wouldn't call us into a meeting unless they had some bad news for us.

The likelihood of a strike at midnight tomorrow is reduced substantially by the progress we made over the weekend.

It shows that even in tough bargaining, if the union and the company meet their responsibilities, a deal can be reached,

Workers everywhere are just starting to say, 'Look, we're fed up with this. We're going to start demanding that we have respect and we have job security and we have decent wages and benefits,'

There's a good mood, ... People know the union, and the company, by the way, have done an excellent job in terms of dealing with what was a very difficult situation.

We're close enough to do this, but far enough away to fall in the ditch, ... We're feeling somewhat better this morning, although we're not there.

We are optimistic today that we can avoid a strike. We could announce something today.

Mr. Green stated I will call you early tomorrow to let you know if and when GM is prepared to table an economic offer, ... It is not clear how much progress can be made until the pattern agreement is tabled.

I think that was a short-term view of the values of Canada.

I don't want to downplay what Cordiano and those guys did ... but at no time in the discussions did Ford say we can't (cut further) because of this (deal) with the government,

I'm so frustrated and angry about this decision, I can't believe it. It's irresponsible at best. My worry is it's consistent with the Harper government's idea of letting the market decide, as opposed to looking after Canadian interests.

The way to solve the problems of the auto industry today is to stop the imports from killing us or get the opportunity to export to those nations that won't let us sell our products today.

Unfortunately, I don't think they would be doing it this way if there was not going to be some negative news about changes. If there were no changes, they could just simply give us a phone call. But it doesn't look good.

We're certainly working towards a settlement and quite frankly, I'd like to do it before the 20th, given the state of the industry and the state of the companies, ... If we can do it early, I think that would be a credit to all of us.

Clearly, in the wake of today's announcement, the long-run future of the St. Thomas assembly plant is in jeopardy.

We will move ahead and we will have a stronger position in terms of progressive politics down the road.

We're not going to have a rich agreement, but we're going to have a responsible agreement.

We have a new 1996 collective bargaining agreement, ... I think this is good for General Motors, CAW and all of our employees.

They tabled a large number of offsets, some make sense as long as it doesn't disadvantage our members, ... But a number of those we're just not going to buy into.

We thought we had all of this behind us this morning, and now we're back to another couple of issues that are sticklers for us,

I'm more optimistic today, we should be able to do this in the next few hours. The only way we couldn't is if they stuck to their position on reducing our relief and didn't solve the job security issues in St. Catharines, Windsor, Oshawa and Woodstock.

working on finalizing an agreement that balances the needs of the CAW, our employees and the company.

We're not afraid of change, we embrace change. But not at the expense of our members and their families and their communities.

There is still such a vast difference in the costs it would be impossible to get close to our costs.

We've had one strike in the last 30 years with Ford, ... It shows that they work a lot harder to get something that is mutually acceptable.

If I was making a prediction today, we'll be on the picket line, forced there by DaimlerChrysler management,

All these issues are the same. The right wing and the employers are saying that people shouldn't have security, but people should have the ability to put roots down and buy a home and raise a family.

It's going to strike a lot of Windsor families today when they get this news.

We really did think we'd have this thing done late this morning or early afternoon, but it's become more difficult than we had anticipated, ... There's a lot of very difficult issues related to job security at all locations.

We faced one of the most difficult challenges in bargaining that we have in a good many years, ... the Ford workers probably knew that more than anyone, given the amount of downtime they've had, given the uncertainty, the media speculation of workplace closures and layoffs.

Just because we're a low wage economy and you can get someone to do our job cheaper, you don't have the right to sell our jobs as long as we're meeting the commitment of quality and productivity.

We're going to hang with the deadline, ... We either have a settlement or we'll have a shutdown tomorrow night at midnight. We're working toward a settlement and we hope the company is doing the same thing.

I'm up to the challenge. I love what I do and I'm not offended by somebody running at all.

They're demanding major outsourcing of our jobs, not because they need it but because they think they can make them somewhere else cheaper.

It was an extremely challenging situation that could have led to a shutdown. I believe our members will see the wisdom in what we have done here.

Given the current economic context that we're in, this is not the richest-ever agreement that we have bargained, but it's a responsible bargaining, recognizing all of the issues that we face,

The likelihood of a strike tomorrow at midnight is greatly reduced.

It was pretty clear that they couldn't do anything by saying we led the way in improving wages, pensions and job security for people in a time when they were going the other way in the U.S.,

Our major problem is imports and lack of ability to export into the emerging growth markets of Asia. They ship into North America at their leisure and they close their markets to anything built in Canada and the United States.

Our union does not resist change, so long as we can manage it in a way that does not threaten our members.

So we're going to give them the opportunity now to move off of that and try to get a settlement even before the 20th, but failing that there will be a strike. And the last formal get-together we had with DaimlerChrysler they were just as tough then as they were prior to us selecting Ford.

What we did here was based on relationships and commitments by Ford to its workforce and the long-term relationship with our union and the importance they place on us,