GM lays off 4,600 workers in Canada
TORONTO About 4,600 Canadian auto workers are off the job as the labour strike at General Motors Co.’s American facilities enters its second week, disrupting operations for both GM and smaller parts suppliers north of the border.
As of Monday, General Motors Canada had temporarily laid off about half of its 5,882 hourly employees, GM Canada’s vice-president of corporate affairs David Paterson said. Two-thirds of the 1,100 hourly workers who made engines destined for the U.S. at GM’s St. Catharines, Ont., facility were told to stay home Monday, joining the approximately 2,100 workers who stopped work last week after GM halted production at its Oshawa, Ont., plant’s truck and car assembly lines.
On top of that, Canadian auto-parts suppliers have temporarily laid off about 1,700 workers, according to Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union. Despite the layoffs and scaled back production at two of its facilities, Paterson said GM’s Canadian operations have been resilient.
“We’ve done extraordinarily well given the integrated nature of the whole system with the U.S. down,” Paterson said. “Our focus is to keep as many people at work as long as we can.”
GM will continue to run at full capacity at its Ingersoll, Ont., plant called CAMI, where about 2,400 hourly workers on three shifts assemble the popular Chevrolet Equinox. The remaining employees at St. Catharines and Oshawa are working to support CAMI; about 365 people in St. Catharines are producing transmissions and about 100 people in Oshawa are on the body stamping line for the Equinox.