WHO IS JERR Y DIAS?
He’s been dubbed the $5 billion blue-collar man for his triumphs over the Big 3 automakers this year, but the union boss’s father says Jerry Dias just doesn’t give up.
Jerry Dias Sr. has t wo bad hips and a straightforward manner. Whatever is on the 90- year- old’s mind is offered up point blank, including his assessment of his youngest child and only son, Jerry Jr., president of Unifor, the country’s largest private-sector union.
Jerry, his dad said, may indeed be blunt, unafraid of a good tussle and unimpressed by executives with fancy sounding titles and university degrees stacked up behind their names, and in that he takes after his old man. But, at root, he truly is his “mommy’s boy,” and the baby of the Dias family, with three older sisters.
Much like his mother, Juliet, Dias has a big heart — even his would- be enemies like him, or at least they don’t actively dislike him — as well as a maniacal work ethic, an unshakable belief that with enough effort, with enough hours put in, anything is possible, even the seemingly impossible, such as helping convince General Motors Co. to reopen a plant in Oshawa, Ont.
“I was lucky in that I got to work with and learn from Bob White and Buzz Hargrove, two of the premier labour leaders in the history of our country,” he said. “And they both had the same advice: ' Follow your gut, go with your first instinct.'"
In Oshawa, Dias’ first instinct was to fight.
Two years ago, he told his dad over a jug of Michelob beer at the Portly Piper Pub in Oshawa that he simply wasn’t going to accept GM’S decision to close its plant in the city east of Toronto, tossing some 2,500 workers out of work, and closing the books on 100 years of car-making history in the area. His father, an old union hand (as was Juliet, who died in 2015) didn’t doubt him.
“Jerry is a worker, he never stops,” Jerry Sr. said. "There was no way Jerry was ever going to give up.”
Three weeks ago, when Jerry Sr.'s phone rang at his house in north Oshawa at 7 a. m., because his son knows not to call his father any earlier, he listened as Jerry Jr. told him that — after all the attack ads, threatened boycotts, layoffs, media grandstanding, wildcat strikes, setbacks, détentes and plot twists, such as befriending Sting, one of the world’s best- selling musicians, getting to know Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on a first- name basis and saying “f--- you” to Ontario Premier Doug Ford on live television — he had done it.
GM wasn’t leaving Oshawa, but roaring back with $ 1 billion to $ 1.3 billion in new investment, a mandate to build trucks and a commitment to hire up to 1,700 workers.
“Jerry was happy as a lark when he got that General Motors agreement,” his dad said. “I wasn’t surprised. He had always said that he was not going to give up.”
Others, however, including most industry insiders and the captains of Canadian automotive enterprise, were taken aback.
Generally, when GM makes up its mind to do something, there is no undoing it. Those who predicted a new deal for Oshawa were few in number and, arguably, “delusional," said Rob Wildeboer, executive chairman and co- founder of Martinrea International Inc., a global autoparts supplier, and a sometime- opponent of Dias in labour talks.
“I think Jerry should be commended,” Wildeboer said. “We don’t agree on all things, but we do agree that we need an industry here, and I think he has done a good job for his people, and he has done a good job for all of us.”
Don Walker, chief executive of auto- parts giant Magna International Inc., phoned Dias to offer his congratulations.
“Jerry deserves a fair amount of credit,” he said, adding that he knows him to be “straightforward” and “honest” from dealings with him, even when they agree to disagree.
Sting also got on the horn to offer Dias props.
Not every measure of the man is equally glowing. One industry insider describes Dias as utterly likable, but “almost Trumpian in his media narcissism.”
No matter. Having previously this year secured nearly $3.5 billion in agreements from Ford Motor Co. of Canada and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, as well as a commitment from the Ontario and federal governments to sweeten the Ford deal with an additional $ 590 million, GM’S Oshawa news came as the third in a string of fall home runs for the labour boss. Folks around the Unifor offices have begun referring to Dias as the “five- billion-dollar man.”
Of even greater significance than the money was the timing of the announcements, said Dimitry Anastakis, a Canadian business historian at the University of Toronto.
The narrative around the Canadian automotive industry for years has been one of decline and contraction. Globally, meanwhile, automakers are in the midst of a spending binge to develop electric vehicles ( EVS) and autonomous ones. Both the Ford and the Fiat Chrysler deals involve producing EVS.
All the spending and one- upmanship is akin to the space race, only the frontiers are the open roads of this world, and the promise is riches almost beyond measure, rather than national pride, should one company get a sizable jump on the rest in the EV market.
With so much at stake, were Canada to have missed out on the current rush of new investment, it would have been “game over” for the industry, Anastakis said. In the late 1980s, the Oshawa plant alone employed 20,000 workers. Ever since, those manufacturing jobs have been bleeding away, at GM, at Ford and at Fiat Chrysler.
The trucks GM plans to build in Oshawa might be of the old, dirty fossil-fuel burning variety, but they are top sellers domestically, and the company is also building an EV test track in town.
Instead of marking the next chapter in a story of decline, 2020 appears to be a new beginning for the Big Three in Canada. And it just so happens that the guy in the middle of all the good news works for the union.
“If I was Jerry, I would retire now, since I don’t know how he is going to top this,” Anastakis said.
Retirement, Dias said, chuckling, is still a few years off. On a recent Friday afternoon, the 62- year- old was sipping on a bottle of water at Unifor’s local chapter in Oshawa. Masked union employees, upon catching sight of their boss, repeatedly thanked him.
The vibe was positively joyous, if socially distanced, and represented a dramatic shift from previous months, when the union had been looking to sell the low-slung building on the edge of Lake Ontario, near the GM plant, because it didn’t need the space. Now, the phones are ringing again and people are stopping in to fill out resumés for the new jobs.
Dias, however, was feeling wistful, and went hunting for a tissue to dab at his eyes as he spoke of his mother. Alzheimer’s stole Juliet’s memory before it took her life five years ago. She never got to see her son reach the pinnacle, which, barring any further surprises, he seems to have reached.
“My mother was the most caring person I’ve ever met,” he said. “It’s a problem for me, talking about her.”
In person, Dias dresses the part of the working-class hero: no suit, no tie, no thanks; instead, he wears jeans, a brown leather jacket and practical black shoes.
He pulled up outside the Unifor office in a minivan.
He had dark circles beneath his eyes, and had packed on a couple of extra pounds around his middle during the negotiating season with automakers. He doesn’t have any hobbies. He doesn’t really like golf.
He works.
“It is my passion,” he said, “so I don’t really look at it as a job.”
Indoctrination started early. By the time Dias was old enough to walk, he was carrying a sign “bigger than he was” in Labour Day parades. He made bacon and tomato sandwiches at the family home in northeast Toronto for the bargaining team when his father was on strike at the nearby de Havilland aircraft manufacturing plant. Needless to say, the Dias family voted NDP.
But he initially flirted with the idea of becoming a physical education teacher, before dropping out of York University and getting a job at de Havilland in 1978.
Soon after, he was elected as a union shop steward and set about climbing the ranks to become president of the local.
All these years later, Dias still points to 1991 as his greatest pre- GM triumph on the front lines of the labour wars. Under intense union pressure, a proposed deal to sell the company, which was then the largest industrial employer in the Toronto area, to some European players was scuttled.
“He became a pain in de Havilland’s ass,” Jerry Sr. said, with obvious delight.
Ultimately, Dias has been a pain in a lot of employers’ behinds.
After the de Havilland win, he joined the Canadian Auto Workers’ national office, and further honed his chops working as a senior assistant to past CAW presidents Buzz Hargrove and Ken Lewenza Sr.
Unifor, the private- sector mega- union consisting of 315,000 members, formed eight years ago when the CA W and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union merged. Lewenza endorsed his chief lieutenant for the top job, and away Dias went.
Unifor now represents workers at hundreds of companies, including Bell Canada, Air Canada, Canadian National Railway Co. and Postmedia Network Canada Corp., where National Post editorial employees in Toronto recently voted in favour of joining the union.
What Dias views as Unifor’s greatest strength is its sheer size. It is a union, but, with members across the economy, it is also a political force to be reckoned with, even if organized labour’s power has dwindled from its heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s as globalization and automation eliminated many jobs in union strongholds such as manufacturing.
Back then, more than 40 per cent of workers were unionized, but rates thereafter dropped fairly substantially, before evening out around the 30-per-cent mark, according to Statistics Canada. There were 4.57 million union members in 2019, or 28.3 per cent of all employees in Canada, both of which figures are up slightly from 2018.
Of course, every scrappy underdog yarn requires a foil, just as every wholesome, Hollywood- type ending — where, say, an evil politician gets bounced from office, or an evil corporation caves and the working stiffs win out in
If I was Jerry I would retire now since I don’t know how he is going to top this.
the end — requires a reality check.
Somewhat overlooked in Oshawa’s miraculous rebirth as a car- manufacturing town is that GM doesn’t operate as a non- profit. Whether it was spending a nickel or earmarking $ 1.3 billion in new investment for its Canadian operations, the Detroit- headquartered company wasn’t going to do anything in Oshawa that it didn’t want to do, unless there was a market rationale for doing it.
Dias may have commandeered the spotlight — Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, a national trade association, describes his ability to dominate the daily news cycle as his “secret sauce” — but behind the scenes, General Motors of Canada president Scott Bell had command of the company’s internal numbers, projections, spreadsheets and its master plan for the North American market, not to mention his superiors’ contact information in Michigan.
Bell happily made the case to his bosses that GM didn’t need to build a new plant to meet demand as truck sales surged when the pandemic started shutting things down. They already had an idled plant in Canada, with an experienced workforce that could rapidly — and eagerly — gear up.
A veteran automotive industry player, who requested anonymity, offered a back- of- the- napkin calculation on what GM’S expected return on investment might be in Oshawa: $ 367 million in after-tax annual gains once the trucks start rolling off the line. In other words, after four years, the company’s Oshawa reboot will have paid for itself, after which it is all gravy.
That suits Dias just fine, since 1,700 jobs are coming back to the plant, while the spinoff effect could mean jobs for thousands more in the autoparts supplier community.
It hasn’t been an easy road to get even that many employees back. Dias freely admits that after letting fly with a GM- bashing Super Bowlad in February 2019, watching Sting play a concert for workers in Oshawa and paying strategic communications firms $ 3 million in fees to stage- manage the mayhem — and keep his name, and the cause, in lights — he still wound up losing the initial battle.
GM agreed in May 2019 to keep a paltry 300 workers in Oshawa to make aftermarket parts, to repair damaged vehicles instead of making actual cars.
“It was a failure, and you can’t escape that, and it wears on you,” Dias said. “We didn’t keep the plant open.”
But they did keep the lights on, and as long as the lights were on, there was, in theory, hope of more. What nobody could have anticipated was that the metaphorical cavalry would turn out to be a pandemic.
Does that make Dias lucky, or is he just good at what he does? Perhaps a bit of both, but he is not about to give his thoughts on the matter, that’s for sure. Throw words at him such as “legacy,” and it makes him visibly uncomfortable.