Bombardier is corporate greed at its worst; nationalizing it could create the global leader we need

By embracing worker management and open source designs, a publicly-owned Bombardier could lead us toward a equitable post-carbon economy

by Dru Oja Jay

Bombardier, Quebec’s Ski-doo manufacturer-turned-aerospace and rail giant, has been getting some bad press. When the company was in trouble last year, Quebec’s provincial government bailed them out with a $1 billion investment. In 2017, the Federal government kicked in $372 million in loans. Bombardier then announced sweeping job cuts — 14,000 positions worldwide, 5,000 in Canada. Shortly thereafter, Bombardier executives offered themselves $32 million in bonuses (under pressure, they later delayed payment).

Bombardier CEO Alain Bellemare (2016 salary: $9.5 million) with Liberal Minister of Transport Marc Garneau: failed corporate leadership.

To top it off, Bombardier’s latest round of federal funding propped up its struggling line of luxury private jets. In a global moment characterized by profound inequality and the existential threat of climate chaos, what could be a more dubious use of public money than to shore up a line of high-flying gas guzzlers for the one percent?

In this sense, Bombardier embodies the worst of Canada. Corruption, wasted talent and fossil fuel excess in the name of jobs and a sort of industrial national pride.

What could be a more dubious use of public money than to shore up a line of high-flying gas guzzlers for the one percent?

But there are ways in which Bombardier could and should be celebrated.

Why? Because it represents the major achievements of both public financing and thousands of workers. Creating a competitive transportation and aerospace firm isn’t an easy task; it takes real talent, decades of hard work, and ingenuity. Bombardier acquired Canadair, a publicly-owned aircraft manufacturer in 1986, and in 1992, bought Canada’s de Havilland, along with two publicly-owned railcar manufacturers.

Even without considering the direct public subsidies and corporate tax cuts it has benefitted from, today’s Bombardier was built with public money.

If we set that aside, Bombardier’s remaining accomplishments belong to its workers, who competed in a global high-tech industry despite the morale-crushing actions of a mendacious, morally decrepit leadership. Their technical and business achievements are all the more impressive for it.

It’s easy to complain about Bombardier, but what should replace it? In the age of rapid climate change and social crises, kicking the ass of corporate welfare bums could be satisfying. But it would also fall short of the mark. We need visionary strategies for rapid adaptation to a post-carbon economy on a global scale.

Bombardier’s current pathetic state is an opportunity for a study in contrasts. We can build a better Bombardier.

Here’s what it could look like.

Public ownership

Private ownership of large companies has been characterized, in the current era, by colossal failures of imagination and a persistent aversion to acting in a fashion consistent with human survival.

In critical times, publicly-owned companies have two advantages that private ownership is structurally incapable of delivering: democratic control and the ability to use profits — and run deficits — in service of the public interest.

While public firms aren’t traditionally known for innovation, that’s mostly a matter of perception. The internet, to cite one example, was developed and incubated in publicly-owned research labs and universities while phone companies were charging $10/minute for overseas phone calls.

Given that Bombardier was built with public funding and the efforts of mistreated workers, there is no moral case against nationalizing it by passing legislation that would facilitate its sale at a fair price.

The obstacles to a publicly-owned, cooperatively managed Bombardier (Bombardier Co-op for short), instead, lie in the political landscape and in our collective imagination. With Liberals hell bent on inequality-increasing neoliberalism, and the NDP largely hewing to better-but-still-tepid social democratic policies, it will take bold mass movements to put such a project on the table.

Still, it’s worth considering.

Bombardier was built with public funding and the efforts of mistreated workers; there is no moral case against nationalizing it.

A green mandate for the people

The luxury jet division would have to be repurposed. But a publicly owned Bombardier Co-op could do lots of other stuff that could speed the transition to a zero-carbon economy, starting with what it’s already doing and moving into areas where new work is desperately needed. For instance:

Expanding light rail and subways in cities

Building a high-speed inter-city train network

Creating ultra-low-cost electric vehicles and a dense network of fast charging stations

Designing the next generation of zero-carbon sea and air transportation

Bombardier’s sophisticated manufacturing infrastructure could be used to build a post-carbon transportation system.

True public infrastructure spending

The Liberal government has committed $120 billion to investments in infrastructure over 10 years. That is theoretically a much-needed step forward, but in its actual implementation, it unnecessarily hands billions of dollars to private investors at the expense of taxpayers. It could get worse still: in the name of profits, public planning itself will become a secretive process designed for optimal return on investment, not the public interest.

Stopping the corporate giveaways through public financing and planning is only step one. We can do much better.

It’s not the inevitable fate of public infrastructure spending to become corporate profits which mostly end up in tax havens. With a Bombardier Co-op, profits could mainly finance stable, good-paying jobs for people who pay taxes and spend their money locally.

Open source has global benefits

Open source is an old idea at this point. The operating systems that run most of the web, and increasingly other sectors, are run on software that is free to download, use, modify and redistribute. The freedom comes with one condition: that any changes also be available with the same freedoms. This method of development is so successful that giant IT companies like IBM have long since given up on maintaining control of the code and pay their experts to contribute to the digital commons because it’s useful to have access to the most knowledgeable people.

Open source has made headway into the hardware business with projects like Wikispeed — a hyper-efficient open source car — and a series of open source tools for building and farming that can be built in a reasonably outfitted workshop. With the rise of 3D printing technology, open source hardware is the future of everything from kitchen appliances to airplanes and ocean liners.

That said, open source hasn’t broken into large-scale public infrastructure yet. A Bombardier Co-op could make plans and manufacturing processes for its trains (for example) part of the global information commons. This would have countless immediate benefits, starting with speeding up the zero-carbon transition in the global south by making zero-carbon transportation cheaper and easier to build. Open sourcing its products could also speed up innovation and efficiencies as researchers in universities and other businesses start adding improvements and new features. The digital commons maintained by the Bombardier Co-op would rapidly increase in value, and firms with proprietary designs would be hard-pressed to innovate at the same speed.

Open source designs could be rapidly adapted for use with different materials and under different weather conditions, increasing the value of the digital commons — and adding to the value of the Bombardier Co-op’s intellectual capital. Giving away intellectual property to the commons might seem like it would lead to decline in profits, but in practice, businesses have proliferated around digital commons like Linux.

Worker management

Lessons must be learned from crown corporations like Canada Post, where overcompensated Vice Presidents take sadistic pleasure in degrading their employees’ morale and working conditions. That kind of management style is a political choice aimed at ultimately undermining public ownership, so there’s nothing inevitable about it. But again, there’s more to do than avoid being terrible.

A Bombardier Co-op would begin the transition to democratic control of its day to day management by its workers. If done right, this could have several benefits: stable jobs, increased morale, and greater innovation. Management experts have long argued that self-directed workforces are more productive and responsive for years, but they face a countervailing force — the struggle for power in the workplace by executives and management — which hampers the implementation of workplace democracy.

Cooperative management and ownership have an excellent track record overall, lasting longer and providing more stability than traditional businesses.

Positive political feedback loops

Worker-self management needs to be carefully implemented, and coupled with a real stake in the overall direction of the Bombardier Co-op. In its partial implementations, it can be a way to shirk accountability for budget cuts by giving workers the responsibility for cutting pay or reducing jobs in response to austerity measures.

That said, the potential rewards are huge. A fully democratic Bombardier Co-op co-managed by the public and its workers could, under the right conditions, fuel the growth of a myriad of cooperative businesses in Canada and around the world through collaborations and specialized research and support.

A Bombardier Co-op could also entrench positive political dynamics. We’re used to huge corporations using their political clout to get sweetheart deals from governments while doing nothing for the public. Indeed, Bombardier’s current deal with the government is as good an illustration as we have.

Imagine the political power that a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of mobilized worker-owners could wield for public investment in a rapid transition to a prosperous zero-carbon economy. Corporations have long benefitted from feedback loops centred on mutually reinforcing increases in inequality and concentrations of political power.

It’s time to put the same dynamics to work for equality and human survival.