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
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