‘It’s sombre in there’
Union vows action as workers mull future after company shutdown
Sadness mixes with anger as union vows “one hell of a fight” to save Oshawa plant,
For Scott Richards, an electrician who’s been with General Motors for 32 years, news that the auto giant will cease production at its Oshawa plant brought on a grim sense of déjà vu. On Monday morning, dozens of workers left the facility to stand in the frigid rain, having stopped work as they waited for details on the company’s plans.
“It’s sombre in there. This is the third time I’ve been through this, and it’s awful,” said Richards, who has worked at two other plants that are now closed.
“I’ll be OK, because I could probably take a package and retire. But I really feel awful for the people who’ve been here 10 or 12 years.”
Timi Watson has been working on the assembly line at the car plant for 14 years. It’s in the family blood — her sister also works at the company and her father retired from it. She holds out hope that the auto giant will choose to stay in the city.
“It’s heartbreaking, it makes you feel sick. A lot of us grew up together we’ve been doing this for 20 years. Lots of us went through the plant closure with the north plant. That was devastating but we knew we were coming here to have a job at GM, but this time, they close the plant, there’s nowhere to go.’’ GM officially announced Monday it will stop production in Oshawa at the end of 2019, confirming media reports from Sunday evening.
The move sparked anger and uncertainty in the GTA and across Canada as politicians and workers reacted to the decision. It’s part of a broad restructuring at GM, which is also ceasing production at four plants in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland, in order to cut costs and focus more on autonomous and electric vehicles, the company said.
Richards, whose grandfather and father both worked for GM, doesn’t expect his daughter to carry on the family auto work tradition. “I’d tell her to go into something else. And that’s sad because I’ve made a good living here,” he said.
According to GM’s website, production at the Oshawa plant began on Nov. 7, 1953. In the 1980s, it employed roughly 23,000 people. Now, a GM spokesperson says, there are about 2,600 hourly workers and about 300 contract and salary employees.
Those workers take immense pride in what they’re doing, Richards said.
“This is the best product in the world. There’s no reason for the company to have done this.”
David Paterson, GM Canada’s vice-president for corporate and environmental affairs, told the Star in a phone interview that of the 2,600 hourly workers, half are eligible for a full pension.
Under the plant’s union contract, the company has to give notice of any significant change where it could end production, he added. The plant’s products, the Cadillac XTS and Chevrolet Impala sedans as well as the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra trucks, are being discontinued at the end of 2019.
“We have to give notice because we need to then wind down the workforce,” said Paterson. “So that will happen in stages. The first will be around the summer of next year, we’ll lose about a third of the employees in the plant and then the other two-thirds would be at the end of 2019.”
Paterson said the company has “tried for a year” to see if it could find any product to put in Oshawa after the end of 2019.
“Because we’re at capacity and because the car market moved away, we were not successful,” he said. “We have the best technology in the plant already, we have the best workers in the world in the plant, we just don’t have the product.”
For the last several years, as gas prices have remained low, consumers have gravitated toward bigger, roomier vehicles like pickup trucks and sportutility vehicles. Demand for small and mid-size cars has plunged. Earlier this year, Ford said it would stop making sedans for the North American market and announced cuts in its workforce.
Jerry Dias, the national president of Unifor, which represents workers at the plant, told members packed into a hall at the Oshawa headquarters of Unifor Local 222, “they are not closing our damn plant without one hell of a fight.”
Speaking to loud cheers at the fiery news conference Monday afternoon, Dias said he’s already spoken to the provincial government and is flying to Ottawa on Tuesday to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“We have to use every trick, every tool of government to make sure GM understands they’re not going to take advantage of this country,” Dias said.
He later told the Star that workers at the plant make roughly $36 an hour.
“GM is making a foolish decision that doesn’t make sense according to their own metrics. This is their best-run plant,” he said.
Both the province and federal government acquired GM shares in 2009 after providing about $10.6 billion in aid to the automaker. They unloaded the last of the shares in 2015, a decision Dias said “sure doesn’t help” with their leverage now.
At Mr. Burger, a nearby diner which has been in Oshawa for 42 years, the news hit hard. “When you know how people are dependent on GM, it hurts, especially around Christmastime,” said owner James Panos, whose great-grandfather worked for GM.
Panos, whose house specialty is the GM burger — topped with bacon, ham and cheese — estimates 25 to 30 per cent of his customers work at GM.
“And the other 70 per cent are probably related to or friends with someone who does,” said Panos, whose diner is about a five-minute drive from the GM plant.
In a statement, Unifor leadership said they do not “accept the closure of the plant as a foregone conclusion.
“The union is assuring members that we are calling on General Motors Canada to allocate product to Oshawa. The Oshawa assembly plant is GM’s most decorated plant with a highly skilled, committed workforce.”
The statement added “our plant has been in this situation before with no product on the horizon, and we were able to successfully campaign for continued operations.”
The province and federal government acquired GM shares in 2009 after providing about $10.6 billion in aid to the automaker