The investment comes as Canada's auto sector grapples with 25% U.S. tariffs on vehicles, with President Trump pledging to double them to 50% on Jan. 1.
Page F1From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Essay hails 'the power labor holds' as auto union deal sends $791.3 million to Canada
As it ran on the front
The essay this week is titled 'Eugene Debs Knew the Power Labor Holds.' It's a fine piece of labor history: Debs, the strikes, the argument that organized workers can move an economy simply by refusing to move themselves.
Here's the filing that runs against that table. This week's auto workers' union deal, the one covering plants tied to General Motors, commits $791.3 million in new investment. Not to Detroit. Not to Ohio. To Canadian factories, at the same moment the administration's tariff policy is supposedly squeezing automakers into building here instead.…
…(cont) Let's be precise about what that number is. $791.3 million is not a rounding error and it is not a gesture. It is a specific, negotiated, contractually binding sum, arrived at by people whose entire job is knowing exactly where the money lands. It landed in Canada.
The tariffs were sold as a lever: tax the imports, and the jobs come home. Reconcile the ledger and the lever doesn't show up in this column. The jobs, or at least $791.3 million worth of them, went the other direction, tariff pressure notwithstanding, union deal notwithstanding.
None of this is a knock on the union, hon. A union that wins $791.3 million in committed capital for its members is a union doing its job, wherever the plants happen to sit. The question isn't why labor asked for the investment. The question is why the number that was supposed to prove the tariffs work is the same number that shows the tariffs didn't move it.
Labor holds power. Debs was right about that, and the deal itself is proof — a union that can negotiate three quarters of a billion dollars in committed capital is a union with real leverage. What the deal doesn't prove is that the leverage is currently pointed at American soil. The gap between the policy's stated goal and the deal's actual zip code is $791.3 million wide, and that gap has an address, and the address is Canada.
Run it against the table again next quarter. See which column it lands in then.
“They tell you tariffs are bringing the jobs home, then the union signs a deal and the money lands in Canada anyway. Labor still got paid, that part's real — it's the 'come home' part that was always up for negotiation.”
“The tariffs are working exactly as intended, protecting American manufacturing across the board — including, apparently, the Canadian plants, which, look, are part of the broader integrated supply chain, so that's actually still a win for us, structurally.”
The receipts
The following essay is excerpted from the book This is How We Win: A Guide to Building Working-Class Uprisings , forthcoming on September 8 from Haymarket Books. We highly recommend checking it out. By the beginning of the 20th century…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.