Workers are seen leaving work on their last day at the General Motors plant in Oshawa on the final day of production on Dec. 18, 2019.Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press
General Motors Co.'s 1,700 unionized workers in Ontario are set to vote on Sunday on a three-year collective agreement that will see vehicle production resume at the auto maker’s plant in Oshawa, Ont.
Detroit-based GM said if the deal is ratified as expected, work will begin immediately on retooling the factory east of Toronto to help it meet rising demand for Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks.
Carlton Plummer, who lost his job after 22 years at the plant when it closed in December, said he is keen to vote in support of the agreement and expects to be called back to the assembly line by next summer.
“It’ll change my life,” Mr. Plummer said in an interview. “I’ll actually have a future.”
Mr. Plummer, 47 years old and the son of a retired GM worker, said the layoff took a deep emotional and financial toll, compounded by the isolation and worries of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s been crazy,” said Mr. Plummer, who describes himself as “an auto industry guy."
"I’ve been in it almost half my life. My father did it. That’s what I want to do,” said Mr. Plummer, who is on unemployment insurance, collecting about half of his former $36-an-hour wage.
He watched on TV on Thursday morning as Unifor president Jerry Dias announced the tentative deal to reopen the plant and resume vehicle production. “I’m not gonna lie, I got pretty misty-eyed,” Mr. Plummer said.
Mary Barra, GM’s chief executive officer, said on a conference call with analysts on Thursday the company will move “very quickly” to refit the plant to keep up with customer calls for trucks.
Amid flat-to-declining North American vehicle sales, pickup trucks and SUVs have grown in popularity. In Canada, light truck sales rose by 2 per cent in 2019, compared with a 22-per-cent drop in passenger cars, according to DesRosiers Automotive Consultants.
“We have been operating our full-size pickup plants around the clock to meet exceptionally robust demand for the Chevrolet Silverado and the GMC Sierra in the United States and Canada,” Ms. Barra said. “The fact is we simply can’t build enough.”
GM said it will spend between $1-billion and $1.3-billion on construction at the Oshawa plant, and will hire 1,400 to 1,700 people to work two shifts making the trucks, which are expected to roll off the assembly line in January, 2022. Mr. Dias said total employment could rise to 2,500 if a third shift is added.
Colin James, president of Unifor Local 222, which represents workers at the plant, said union negotiators led by Mr. Dias were pushing GM to find work for the assembly line, which has been idle since December, 2019, and employed almost 3,000 people when the shutdown was announced in 2018.
“This is something we’ve been talking about, Jerry in particular, for the past couple of months, to see if there’s any feasibility. And it finally came together with the bargaining,” Mr. James said.
There are 175 workers who will be recalled when hiring begins next summer, Mr. James said by phone on Friday from a Toronto hotel, where the bargaining team was ironing out details of the deal. The contract follows a pattern set by negotiations with the other Detroit-based car makers, Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler. The tentative GM agreement also covers workers at plants in Woodstock and St. Catharines, Ont., and provides better wages and benefits.
The three Detroit-based auto makers have recently announced plans to spend a total of $4.8-billion in Ontario, creating 3,700 new auto jobs.
Greig Mordue, an associate professor of manufacturing at McMaster University in Hamilton and a former Toyota Canada executive, said the Oshawa plant offered GM the quickest way to get pickup trucks onto dealer sales lots, even if the work could be done for far less money in Mexico, where building the capacity would take longer.
“General Motors is saying, ‘We have to satisfy the marketplace and we can make more money by making more trucks faster than making trucks later for less cost,’” Prof. Mordue said by phone.
Canada’s auto industry employed 134,000 people in 2019, up from the 110,000 in 2009-2010, when the financial crisis pushed GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy protection. But that is a long way from the 173,000 jobs in 2001, according to Unifor, which counts all positions, from the office to the factory floor, union and non-union.
Prof. Mordue cautioned that the auto industry has a long history of reversing production announcements and closing plants, and said the news of the restart in Oshawa does not change the overall downward trend in employment and production. “The reality is this is a long, slow decline. And, thankfully, there are these occasional positive messages,” Prof. Mordue said.
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