Automakers told to invest in Canada or be punished
Union calling for new vehicle commitments from Big Three manufacturers
Unifor national president Jerry Dias has kicked off what is expected to be an especially challenging round of contract negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three by warning that Canadians will punish companies that disinvest in the country.
The union wants new vehicle commitments from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford and General Motors for their car plants in Oshawa, Oakville, Brampton, St. Catharines and Windsor.
That would stem the industry’s decline in the near term, said Dias. Then Unifor will push for longer-term investments for the development of autonomous and electric vehicles of the future, he said.
“The reality is we are in one tough set of negotiations,” he told reporters in Toronto on Wednesday.
Ford has not announced a new vehicle for its Oakville plant beyond 2023; Fiat Chrysler needs to add another vehicle to its Brampton plant, and two new models are needed to recall a third shift in Windsor, he said. Two programs at the GM engine plant in St. Catharines are also set to expire in 2023, which will mean layoffs for half of Unifor’s 1,150 members there.
Calling the GM Oshawa plant “the elephant in the room,” Dias said that facility needs to be maintained to ensure it can build cars in the future even as it evolves now to building aftermarket parts.
Although he acknowledged that the pandemic has resulted in production stoppages and lost spring sales, the union leader flatly rejected the idea of concessions for Canadian workers.
“Clearly this is an industry that has been printing money for the last decade and I’m not going to allow COVID to be an excuse to somehow not give our members the increases that they deserve,” he said.
There were 21 million vehicles sold in North America in 2019. When the pandemic hit, carmakers expected a significant drop. But Dias said consumers — nervous about using transit or ridesharing — have been car shopping, so he is hopeful that sales will recover more quickly than was anticipated.
Unifor represents 17,000 Canadian auto workers. That is 3,600 fewer than in 2016, following the loss of production last year at GM’s Oshawa plant, the loss of a third shift in Windsor and layoffs at Ford’s giant Oakville facility.
“We told Ford that unless there is a
solution for Oakville, there isn’t going to be a settlement,” said Dias, who said he will announce on Labour Day which of the three manufacturers Unifor will negotiate with first.
The current four-year agreements expire Sept. 21.
Unlike the last recession in 2008-2009, automakers are coming off a period of healthy sales, he said.
But Canada’s car manufacturing has been declining from about three million cars built in 1999 to about 1.9 million last year — a number that is expected to fall again this year.
At Wednesday’s news conference, he argued that GM should leverage the proximity of its autonomous vehicle technology centre in Markham to its test track in Oshawa to also build those vehicles in Oshawa.
“If you have a tech centre that is developing the most modern technology and you have a test track in which to test those vehicles, why wouldn’t you build in Oshawa?” he said.
The Canadian auto sector employs nearly 130,000 people and generates nearly $100 billion in revenue, according to Unifor.