GM firm on closure of Oshawa plant
Automaker tells Ottawa, Queen’s Park it will not be reversing decision
The federal and provincial governments have come up empty-handed in their efforts to convince General Motors to extend the life of its Oshawa assembly plant and preserve the jobs of 2,600 workers.
But Unifor, which represents plant employees, is vowing to step up pressure on the auto giant to reverse the closure, even though GM has already rejected union proposals to keep operations going.
On Tuesday, some 100 Unifor workers walked off the job at Whitby’s Inteva Products — which supplies interior car components to two GM plants, including Oshawa — to protest the looming closure.
Unifor president Jerry Dias vowed more actions in the coming days to “get General Motors’ attention,” part of the union’s campaign to keep the plant open to at least September 2020, as specified by the current collective agreement.
“We are not going to allow our plant to close … we are going nowhere until General Motors reverses its decision,” Dias told reporters in Detroit on Tuesday. But that optimism flies in the face of General Motors’ refusal so far to reconsider the fate of the plant.
Senior GM executives reiterated that determination to Ontario Premier Doug Ford and federal Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains this week, insisting that there was no busi- ness case to keep it open.
In a statement released Tuesday, the auto giant said it told the two levels of government that it would continue to be a “major manufacturer” in Canada with plants in Ingersoll and St. Catharines, and expansion of automotive engineering, software and testing work at other sites around the province.
But it was firm that it would not reverse its Nov. 26 announcement that it would end operations in Oshawa at the end of the year.
“GM reaffirmed that it does not have a viable business case for production at Oshawa Assembly past the end of this year because of rapid changes in the North American car market, the cancellation of Oshawa products and persistent low utilization at the plant,” the company said in its statement.
Bains told the Star Tuesday that he had a “candid” conversation with Mary Barra, the chair and CEO of General Motors, in Detroit and urged her to reconsider.
In a discussion on the sidelines of the North American International Auto Show on Monday, Bains said he told Barra on Monday GM was making a “mistake.”
“We’re very disappointed and frustrated to see that GM will not continue its operations in Oshawa,” Bains said.
Bains would not say if the federal government has had discussions with other firms seeking a site for their manufacturing operations, saying that the “primary focus is still on GM,” despite the company’s firm statements so far that the plant will close. “We’re continuing to explore all options and any solution between GM and, for example, the union, we want to be at the table. We will be part of that solution,” Bains said.
Ford — who was in Detroit with Todd Smith, Ontario’s minister of economic development, job creation and trade — made his own appeal to GM. The premier said he was pleased to hear GM’s commitment to its other operations in Ontario but was not successful getting a reprieve for the Oshawa plant.
“I promised to press General Motors executives to extend operations at the Oshawa plant in order to give the affected workers more time to deal with the impacts of the closure,” the premier said in a statement released on Tuesday.
“Thanks General Motors. For the jobs you create, the investments you make, the communities you support and for choosing to plant your feet firmly on Ontario soil once again.”
That was then-premier Dalton McGuinty in March 2005, announcing funding for the Beacon Project, celebrating what was billed as the most comprehensive automotive investment in Canadian history. The federal government tipped in $200 million, the province anted $235 million, the automaker made a $2.5-billion investment commitment and the premier sounded assured that the province’s Automotive Investment Strategy would hold Ontario’s place as a world leader in auto manufacturing and push it to the forefront of innovation.
As part of the revitalization plan, GM committed to maintaining employment at an average of 16,000 jobs across a nine-year period.
It is instructive to revisit the Beacon Project as a reminder of the history of big subsidies to the auto industry, and
high hopes too, that even in an ever-advancing era of cheaper offshore production, Ontario would keep its place as a, well, beacon for automotive manufacture.
The automaker ultimately breached its target commitments three years later as the financial crisis moved into full swing. The multibillion-dollar bailout that followed understandably leaves a bitter taste for those Oshawa GM plant workers whose jobs have been declared redundant by the decision-makers at corporate headquarters in Detroit.
Unifor president Jerry Dias is attempting to capitalize on the city’s famed auto show as the equivalent of the political hustings this week, promising to take “more drastic action” to get General Motors’ attention. The scope of that action remained unclear at a news conference Tuesday, beyond the walkout of more than 100 workers at the Inteva products plant in Whitby and beyond Dias promising to make the auto show “the worst … that General Motors will ever face.”
Buying time by at least getting the automaker to extend the Oshawa plant closing to September 2020, is clearly on the union’s agenda. But that’s no answer. Writing in the Socialist Project in December, Sam Gindin, research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 19742000, addressed what he called the limited options facing the union.
The impact of consumer boycotts, he writes, are generally marginal and not sustained. “They have only worked in narrow circumstances: boycotting a local business, or in support of a mass movement for social justice, like the opposition to South African apartheid.” Even in the case of South Africa, he adds, the impact was primarily due to institutions such as university pension funds.
Gindin points out that there was no boycott called when Quebec lost its assembly plant, nor London, Ont.
Plant occupation? Such ac- tion would keep the focus on the looming closure but presents no alternative.
“If there is any lesson to be learned here is that overturning this imposed reality can’t be achieved by traditional protest and traditional alternatives,” insists Gindin. And then there’s this cold reality: “No matter what workers do, how good their work, how restrained their demands, and how much they accept in terms of work pressures, they will always remain vulnerable in a system geared to profits, competition and the priorities of stockholders and senior executives. There will always be someplace cheaper to run to.”
The prior uncertainty over product allocation for Oshawa, the phasing out of car assembly, and the finishing and painting of outgoing truck models as opposed to incoming truck models prefigured a plant dynamic that made it especially vulnerable, even after the four-year contract ratified in September 2016, and even after GM’s plant investments of more than $550 million, the bulk of which went to Oshawa.
The Oshawa plant, Gindin writes, “was doomed.” So what’s the plan? Our politicians will no doubt tout GM’s commitment to engineering, software and testing, and champion its technical centres and look ahead to the “mobility campus” slated for Toronto that I have written about before. That’s a standard deflection trick.
Gindin reminds us that at the end of the 1970s, GM had approximately 23,000 plant and office workers in Oshawa. Eighty-five per cent of those jobs have already vanished.
Was the financial crisis of 2008 a possible tipping point? Gindin think so. “If, after the financial crisis, when hundreds of plants were shuttered and we actually had some kind of plan in place and were ready to save some of those plants and capacities, we would today have a structure for also thinking more concretely where the Oshawa plant and its suppliers might fit in.”
Instead we tend to think small at the time of crises.
Gindin is thinking big in ways that will sound outrageous to some, but at least he has more interesting thoughts than Jerry Dias. How about placing the plant under public ownership, with no further compensation to GM, followed by a “grand conversion.” To what? New manufacturing driven by environmental change? How about revamping household appliances for an increasingly environmental future? How do we capture the skills and capacities we do have?
Gindin understands that none of this would be “on” politically, but is disappointed by the inevitable dead-end talk of the union. “Continuing our dependence on unaccountable corporations, offering subsidies and concessions without means to enforce job guarantees, making competitiveness the only test of worthwhile activity, looking to ‘better’ free trade agreements and so on, are dead ends. All they offer is more of the same: death by a thousand cuts.”