Jobs worth fighting for
Union official says saving good jobs in the province is crucial in age of precarious employment,
Earlier this week, not long after General Motors announced it was going to close its Oshawa operations, my mom texted me from Windsor. “Not good news from GM,” she wrote. “The whole time I worked in the plant we dealt with stuff like this. It’s a way of life. I hope it is not as bad as it sounds.”
It seems to be as bad as it sounds, though. Oshawa without GM is almost unthinkable, just as Windsor without GM seemed equally unfathomable once. Yet the trim plant where my mom sewed Cadillac seats for 20 years is now an empty lot and the GM transmission plant is also shuttered and half demolished. What struck me in comments from Oshawa residents this week is how familiar it all sounded. Shock, certainly, but not surprise. A plant closure is the big one everybody waits for in an industrial town. It’s the earthquake, the wildfire, the flood. It has the catastrophic and helpless feeling of a natural disaster, and while it does not come with direct loss of life, the loss of a way of life is deeply traumatic.
You can’t underestimate how these industrial giants dominate their cities physically. There’s a part of Windsor by the Ford plant called Ford City.
The area around the Hiram Walker
distillery, where Canadian Club whisky is made, is called Walkerville. Windsor’s Chrysler minivan plant, if it were located in downtown Toronto, would stretch from Front St. to nearly Bloor St. They’re like skyscrapers that lay on their sides.
More profoundly, these companies weave their way into the lives of everyone in the city. If you didn’t work at one of the big factories, you’d be related to or know somebody who did. We were a GM and Hiram Walker household but my grandfather worked at Chrysler and my uncle at Ford. A neighbour on one side assembled GM transmissions, the one on the other side made minivans.
If you weren’t directly employed by one of these giants, you served their workers in a restaurant or a shop, babysat their kids or did their taxes. When a layoff or plant closure hit, the waves fanned out throughout the city and one job lost would affect many more.
Like many Windsorites, both my parents migrated there in the 1960s because the city was prosperous and booming. When the Windsor GM plants were closing, some workers opted to transfer to Oshawa, uprooting their lives and families to follow the golden manufacturing jobs that are so rare these days.
There is a strange kinship between cities like Windsor and others that share similarly volatile economies. Strange because during my mom’s 20 years at GM, there were rou- tinely rumours of upcoming layoffs in the company, although it wasn’t clear which part would take the hit. GM also had plants in St. Catharines, Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec (closed in 2004) and Scarborough (closed in 1993). Those names loomed large in my young imagination: would they get the layoffs or would mom in Windsor?
The big one was always coming. When the layoffs happened in another city there was never joy, just relief: we were spared this time.
In Windsor and Oshawa, there is an understanding of the struggle other places go through. The decline of the cod fishery in Newfoundland had an air of familiarity, just as Hamilton and its steel industry saga did. When the Alberta oilpatch is in rough shape, an eastern industrial town will be the best place to find empathy. The story continues and the economic roller coaster carries on. In a place as big and economically varied as Toronto, it’s possible to exist in a bubble seemingly untouched by manufacturing losses. Yet the landscape of south Etobicoke is marked by locations where mighty factories with names like Goodyear and Consumers Glass once employed multitudes. Campbell Soup was just the latest to announce a factory closure here, and more golden jobs gone.
While volatile, these jobs were golden because they afforded upward mobility.
It wasn’t private-school money or even second-home money, but a house and car could be bought, a family raised and vacations in Florida taken. The good pay and benefits meant kids could get braces and perhaps be the first in the family to go to university or even grad school. There was even the promise of a pension after years of physical toil.
These golden jobs are the reason there was such nonpartisan support behind the auto bailout in 2009, even if GM has now abandoned the people who propped them up when they were down.
It is ironic, then, that billions can be given to dying industrial giants, but raising the minimum wage and the basic income pilot that attempted to bring some of that golden security and prosperity to individuals, is scrapped. Empathy, it seems, has its limits.