TORONTO — Unifor leadership will meet with General Motors executives on Dec. 20 in Detroit to discuss the automaker’s plans to shutter its Oshawa, Ontario, assembly plant, union boss Jerry Dias told Automotive News Canada.
It was not immediately clear which GM executives would meet with Unifor. A GM spokeswoman said the company meets with Unifor “regularly to discuss our business, but we don’t discuss those meetings externally.”
The meeting would come almost one month after GM said it would stop allocating product to the Oshawa factory at the end of 2019.
The automaker will do the same at an assembly plant in Ohio and one in Michigan as part of a broader restructuring. Dias has promised a major fight with the automaker in the coming months to try to keep the longtime Ontario plant open.
“GM is leaving Canada, and we’re not going to let them,” Dias told The Canadian Press. “We are going to waste General Motors over the next year. Waste them.”
The Oshawa assembly plant builds the Chevrolet Impala and Cadillac XTS sedans, both of which GM plans to cut from its North American lineup, and does final assembly on the previous-generation Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup bodies shipped from Indiana, a program the automaker said will end by December 2019.
Unifor has launched a nationwide “Save Oshawa GM” campaign, which includes a social media blitz, as part of effort to keep the plant operating beyond 2019.
GM on Friday said it would help displaced Oshawa workers find a job, saying it would provide retraining tools and identifying 300 jobs at GM dealerships in Ontario, 100 jobs at other GM facilities and about 2,000 jobs in other industries that could be filled.
“My priority is to have a transition plan for every Oshawa Assembly employee,” GM Canada President Travis Hester said in a statement.
Michael Wayland contributed to this report.
