Throughout 1985 the Workers League, predecessor of the Socialist Equality Parties in Canada and the United States, campaigned to oppose the splitting of the UAW along nationalist lines and called on workers on both sides of the border to fight to preserve the unity of North American autoworkers, which had been forged in the historic struggles of the 1930s and 1940s. As a Workers League pamphlet widely distributed among autoworkers correctly explained, “The split now opens the way to a competitive bidding war between American and Canadian autoworkers, each seeking to undercut the other by offering lower labour costs and higher profits to the auto companies.”