GM workers to undergo daily health checkups
St. Catharines plant to resume operations Monday morning
When 300 General Motors employees go back to work in St. Catharines on Monday, they won’t find the same plant they left in March.
Temperatures will be taken, masks will be mandatory and Plexiglas will be in place in some common areas as part of safety measures added due to COVID-19. “Compared to where they were before to when they come in now, it’s night and day,” said Tim McKinnon, plant chairperson for Unifor Local 199.
“I think they’ll see the changes and if there’s other things we need to fix up, we will.”
General Motors suspended production at the Glendale Avenue plant, which employs 1,150 workers, at the end of the afternoon shift on March 20 due to the pandemic.
This week the company announced a reopening of its North American productions this month.
“As GM Canada resumes operations across our sites, the health and safety of our employees and stakeholders will remain our highest priority,” said GM Canada spokesperson Jennifer Wright by email.
“We have used inputs from the World Health Organization and the Public Health Agency of Canada guidelines to guide our workplace health and safety protocols which include extensive screening, cleaning and other recommended practices.”
Wright said all visitors to the
plant will be required to comply with the safety protocols, too. The company is working jointly with Unifor to recall employees as it restarts operations. Three hundred hourly employees are being recalled to St. Catharines for Monday to restart a portion of the HFV6 line.
The other lines which produce V8 engines and the GF6 transmission will follow in the weeks to come.
Wright said production schedules will be based on market demand.
McKinnon said when employees enter the plant, they’ll be using hand sanitizer and someone will give them a surgical mask that they must wear. Heat cameras will take their temperature.
“If you pass, you go in the plant and off to work you go.”
Employees will sanitize their stations before they start to work and won’t rotate to other stations through the day like they did before for ergonomic relief. McKinnon said that way if someone is sick, they will only contaminate one area instead of the whole assembly area.
The company is instituting physical distancing of two metres or more when possible, including entering and exiting the plant. McKinnon said workers will come in through the west gate and leave through the east gate, rather than entering and leaving from the same gate.
Staggered start and stop times will be instituted for each department across the plant so there aren’t a lot of people coming and going at the same time.
Some tables have been removed from team rooms to create space and only two people can sit at a table at a time. There are plastic dividers so when someone takes their mask off to eat they won’t infect the other person sitting there.
“They’ve bagged off every other chair for social distancing when you don’t have your mask on and taped off a lot of areas,” McKinnon said. “It’s a big change.” McKinnon said GM has learned a lot from what’s been done at other manufacturing facilities and has tried to copy what’s worked there. He said the company has been more than willing to make modifications if they are needed.
While some employees will feel anxiety about going back to the plant, McKinnon said he thinks they will feel better when they see the measures in place.
“We’ve modified some things already based on the trials we’ve run to make it safer for the people,” he said.
“Safety is the overriding priority for the folks in the plant.” Karena.Walter@niagaradailies.com 905-225-1628 | @karena_standard