Canada : Talks down to wire as strike deadline looms at GM
But GM has made it clear — repeatedly — that it’s not willing to talk about new investment in Canada until a labour agreement has first been signed and ratified.
That’s when a contract was signed, and then soon after, “even before the ink was dry,” as national president Jerry Dias puts it, GM shut down the truck assembly plant in Oshawa and moved Camaro production to Michigan.
While it is not unusual for labour talks to go right to a strike deadline, the two sides have publicly staked positions that make it difficult for either to bend.
Dias has said flatly GM will need to start to talk about product, or else there will be a strike.
Kristin Dziczek, director of research at the independent Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., said in an interview last week that the union’s effort to secure a product commitment makes sense, given that winning a popular vehicle model can guarantee jobs.
Dziczek believes GM will have to talk about product during negotiations. “Otherwise you are negotiating in hypotheticals,” she said.
The union is counting on the idea that its threat to shut down operations, especially at the St. Catharines engine plant, will force GM to rethink a willingness to take on a strike, because those engines are used at the Ingersoll plant and at other U.S. assembly plants that make the popular SUVs like the Chevrolet Silverado and Tahoe.
The Ingersoll plant, which is running three shifts, makes the Equinox and GMC Terrain vehicles. Local union officials there have warned plant officials that if GM brings in alternate parts from other facilities, those components will be treated as “hot cargo.”
In a Sept. 8 letter to plant manager Gary Duff, Local 88 Unifor officials said their members “will not handle or work with these parts.”