Letter to the St. Catharines Standard

     The resumption of truck assembly at GM Oshawa (GM back to making trucks in Oshawa) is a good news story, up to a point. What was not been reported anywhere is the fact that the cessation of assembly operations in Oshawa in 2019 facilitated GM’s exiting almost an entire workforce which enjoyed relatively high wages, good employee benefits and pensions. This enabled GM to replace a relatively higher cost workforce with one with much lower wages, fewer benefits and inferior pensions costing GM only about half of what the pre-2019 workforce cost. The closure and reopening of assembly operations in Oshawa enabled GM to cut its labour costs by about in half all with the enthusiastic support of Unifor.

     This provides reason for skepticism. But there is even more reason to be skeptical about these events. Namely, this is not the first time GM has shut down operations at one of its plants only to start them up again with a drastically lower cost labour force. GM has done this before at a UAW organized plant in Michigan. In view of this, one cannot help but suspect that GM very strategically took a page out of its existing playbook and successfully executed the same tactic in Oshawa to slash its labour costs. By doing so GM showed what it can and will do to impose its will.

Bruce R. Allen