The St. Catharines GM plant’s short-lived strike is just a taste of the union dealings unfolding over the past months.
Just after midnight on Oct. 10, 4,300 unionized autoworkers at GM plants in Oshawa, Woodstock and St. Catharines went on strike to protest the motor company’s resistance to adapt to new policies as per an agreement between Unifor and Ford, which was settled on Sept. 19 and ratified on Sept. 24. About twelve hours after the strike began, however, an agreement was settled and workers returned to their posts; on Oct. 15, the agreement was ratified with an astounding 80.5 per cent majority.
The three-year agreement includes several monumental changes for GM employees. Wages are set to increase by almost 20 per cent for production and 25 per cent for skilled trade workers by the end of the agreement. Part-time production workers will see their starting rates increase by nearly $5 per hour, with a $0.59 increase within twelve months.
Full-time temporary workers who have at least a year of seniority at the date of ratification will be converted to full-time workers, allowing plant workers an increased level of job security. The Oshawa Assembly plant has agreed to fully eliminate this classification by Aug. 1, 2026.
Canadian retirees will see benefits with the newly created Universal Health Care Allowance, a quarterly payment that will continue throughout the years of the agreement. Family Day and National Day for Truth and Reconciliation have also been made into two additional paid holidays.
A term specific to the St. Catharines plant includes “significant new investments” for electric drive unit production. This retooling is scheduled to start in the first quarter of 2024, and production to begin in the third quarter of 2025, pending government funding.
GM said it would reduce the time it takes for workers to reach the top rate of pay from eight years to four years and provide bonuses for productivity and quality: $10,000 for full-time and $4,000 for temporary part-time employees.
With agreements settled with Ford and GM, Unifor’s next target will be Stellaris, the final of the Detroit Three automakers. The pattern bargaining technique that Unifor employed, “first reaching an agreement with Ford and then expecting GM and Stellaris to match,” has been working, but there has not yet been any striking at Stellaris in Canada.
While the Canadian negotiations have gone smoothly thus far, the negotiations in the U.S., where roughly 34,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) working for the Detroit Three are on targeted strikes. Lauren Bird of CBC News described that Shawn Fain, UAW president, “has been outspoken about his union’s demands, advocating for a 40 per cent increase in wages, a four-day work week while getting paid for five, better retiree benefits and more.”
However, despite the increasing number of American autoworkers walking off the job, recent statements from Ford describe a company that has reached its economic limit in terms of what it can feasibly and responsibly offer: “We have to set a very clear limit beyond which it starts to hurt our business and starts to hurt our future, and that is not good for anybody,” said Kumar Golhatra, president of Ford Blue. But the UAW is not backing down, as shown by the shutdown of Ford’s Kentucky plant on Oct. 11, in which 8,700 workers walked out.
The past few months have seen an increase in union activity, with the Canadian federal workers’ strike and the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike of actors and writers in Hollywood, to name a few—leading some to call it a ‘summer of strikes.’ According to experts, “unions are being more aggressive at a time when their popular support is high”—with stats coming from an American Gallup poll in August.
With no end in sight for the UAW strikes and Stellaris being the next target of Unifor, the coming months will decide whether this summer of strikes becomes a year of strikes or if agreements are just around the corner.
