Emile Nabbout, president of Unifor Local 195, stands outside a barricaded Titan Tool & Die in Windsor on Dec. 12.Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
At the end of March, tensions erupted at Titan Tool and Die, an auto parts company with operations in Windsor and nearby Warren, Mich.
On the Canadian side, unionized workers tried to block the company from shipping products to the United States. Titan, which makes custom stamping tools used to shape vehicles, wanted to rush those products across the border ahead of imminent U.S. tariffs targeting the auto industry.
“We are going to start a war if you ship tools out of the premises,” Emile Nabbout, president of Unifor Local 195, which represents the workers, told Titan’s chief executive officer, Domenic Chimienti, over the phone.
For two hours that morning, Unifor members blocked a driveway at the facility to prevent company trucks from leaving, according to court documents related to an injunction filed against Unifor by Titan. The impasse ended when Mr. Chimienti called the Windsor Police Service to intervene.
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Nerves had already been fraying at Titan Tool and Die, a small company with roots dating back 70 years in Windsor. Its work force is a fraction of what it used to be, with Titan prioritizing its stateside operations. (Mr. Nabbout says the company was transferring manufacturing equipment to its U.S. facilities, although the court documents refer only to finished products.)
For Titan’s Canadian workers, the situation has only worsened. Roughly 30 employees were laid off in the spring of this year, and 27 people remain but have been locked out by Titan since Aug. 11, after the expiry of their collective agreement.
It has now become the longest labour dispute in Windsor’s history. And Titan workers aren’t sure their jobs are coming back.
Titan Tool & Die has locked out workers since early August as it shifts production to the U.S.Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
The Titan workers are among thousands of others in Ontario’s auto sector who have been affected by the tariff war unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump, which has exacerbated existing problems in the Canadian industry, including a persistent decline in production and the troubled transition to manufacturing electric vehicles.
“We went from more than 300 employees in 2010, to just 27 today,” said Mr. Nabbout in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail. “We believe that Titan’s owners will eventually shut down the plant, and move manufacturing entirely to Michigan.”
Titan Tool and Die Ltd. was founded in 1956 in Windsor by Joseph Szecsei, a Hungarian immigrant who worked as a machinist for Ford Motor Co. Mr. Szecsei also had a keen interest in sculpting metal, a hobby that led him to set up a tool and die shop, supplying metal stamps used by auto manufacturers to mould large sheets of metal into various shapes and sizes. Titan grew over the decades, and at one point was either directly or indirectly supplying all three big auto makers: General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler (now Stellantis NV).
In 2013, the company was taken over by his daughters. It was a leadership change that Titan employee Randy St. Pierre described as “significantly negative” for workers, because the company started demanding wage freezes and increasingly became focused on setting up a sister stamping facility across the border in Warren, he said.
“In the last 12 years, workers have felt almost no job security,” he said.
Titan eventually purchased an auto stamping facility in Warren in 2024, and rebranded it as Titan USA Inc. At the time, there were 60 employees in the original Windsor location. Approximately half of them were laid off within a year of Titan USA incorporating.
A 'locked out' sign is erected outside the small company, which has roots dating back 70 years in Windsor.Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
As the Trump administration ratcheted up its tariff threats, Titan’s American customers demanded expedited delivery of tools to avoid any potential duties.
Today, the U.S. levies a hodgepodge of tariffs on the industry. When it imports an assembled vehicle that is compliant with rules of origin in the North American trade deal, a 25-per-cent tariff applies to the value of non-U.S. content. Auto parts from Canada can continue to flow into the U.S. duty-free. But steep levies on steel and aluminum are adding costs in the industry.
Regardless, Mr. Nabbout is skeptical that tariffs are the reason why the company is outsourcing jobs to the U.S. He believes it could be the appeal of a non-unionized work force down south.
Titan workers and Unifor are trying to fight to keep those remaining jobs in Windsor. It is a battle that has not gone their way, so far.
When their collective agreement expired in July, Mr. Nabbout said union representatives received a 15-page “concession sheet” from the company’s executives, demanding that workers agree to a three-year wage freeze, a new permanent lower wage grid for employees hired after ratification, the reduction of company pension contributions and the elimination of a cost-of-living allowance clause in the collective agreement, which would have raised wages in line with inflation.
This came just months after Titan had taken the union to court to seek an injunction over union members blocking the trucks in late March. The judge in that case ruled that the union did not have a right to prevent the company from moving tools to its customers in the U.S., because it would suffer significant monetary loss from any potential tariff impact if it did not do so.
The judge also noted that Unifor members had initiated the blockade in a period before they began negotiating, meaning that the judge could not consider Unifor’s actions within the context of a labour dispute. Had they made the move during negotiations, the action might have been permitted by the court.
Titan did not respond to a series of questions from The Globe about the labour dispute, including whether the company intends to keep its facility in Windsor. The company also did not respond to queries about how long it plans to keep workers locked out and why it allegedly moved equipment to the U.S.
In Ontario, employers are legally allowed to lock out employees, or bar them from entering work premises, if enough time has passed between both sides attempting to reach a deal, but failing to do so.
Around 30 employees were laid off in the spring of 2025, and 27 employees remain employed but have been locked out by Titan since Aug. 11.Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
For more than four months, workers have been on strike pay, receiving roughly $350 weekly, a sum that Mr. St. Pierre said is pushing many of them into substantial debt. “Many have had to take out lines of credit and max out credit cards because this has been going on for a while now. We could accept the contract, but the employer is not even guaranteeing us that we will have [long-term] jobs to come back to,” he said.
At Unifor’s end-of-year convention in Toronto recently, the union’s national leadership announced that it had raised $229,000 from other locals across the country and personal donations for Titan’s locked-out workers. It is an amount that Mr. Nabbout said will greatly help Titan’s workers, although he remains concerned that the company has not announced any plans to come back to the bargaining table or end the lockout.
Mr. Nabbout said the last time his local heard from the company was in late summer, when he asked a hypothetical question about whether Titan’s owners could guarantee some semblance of job security for workers if they went ahead and accepted the deal in its current form (including wage freezes).
“They did not give me a straight answer. The plant is now empty. This is why I’m not sure if we have jobs to come back to.”