GM, Unifor go from strife to ‘right solutions’

For four years the relationship between General Motors and the Canadian union Unifor was in tatters — marked by a strike, blockades, an international media campaign and the end of vehicle production at Oshawa Assembly.

Things have changed.

Since November, across back-to-back rounds of bargaining, GM and Unifor have agreed to new contracts that include up to CA$2.3 billion ($1.8 billion) in new investments in the automaker's Canadian assembly plants. By this time next year, Oshawa is expected to be building trucks again, and GM's CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, will build electric cargo vans for the company's new BrightDrop fleet business, unveiled this month during CES.

"We're at a point in our collective history where there are opportunities, and I'm not going to allow the past to get in the way of them," Unifor President Jerry Dias said.

GM and the union quietly began negotiating a new contract for CAMI early this month , long before the previous contract there was set to expire in September. GM is eager to begin production of its new EV600 electric commercial van this year, and Dias said Unifor did not want to pass up an opportunity for a major investment — and a new production mandate.

"We knew we needed to move fast and we needed a place to build it," GM Canada President Scott Bell said on Automotive News Canada's weekly podcast. "We went to the union and asked if we could get together here and talk about a potential opportunity and not wait until that opportunity passed us by."

GM agreed to pour CA$1 billion ($791 million) into CAMI to build the van there starting in November to fulfill an order for FedEx. Vans initially will be built in an unused body shop before the assembly line is converted to van production in 2023, according to the union.

The CAMI plant currently builds GM's popular Chevrolet Equinox crossover. But with a redesign due in 2024 and two plants in Mexico also building the model, there has been significant uncertainty about what the factory would produce in the long term.

It was an issue that union leaders raised as far back as 2017 during its last round of CAMI bargaining with GM: Unifor demanded that GM designate the factory as the company's lead producer of the Equinox.

It was unable to secure such language from GM, leading to a monthlong strike that ended only after the company threatened to pull production out of CAMI entirely.

The friction continued. GM in late 2018 said it would cease vehicle production at Oshawa, enraging union leaders including Dias, who said GM had in effect declared "war on Canada." The union launched a cross-border media campaign to antagonize the automaker, called for a boycott of Mexico-made GM vehicles and blockaded GM Canada's headquarters near the Oshawa plant.

The actions stopped in May 2019 after GM and Unifor agreed to launch an aftermarket parts stamping program at Oshawa that would keep the plant running with a few hundred employees, leaving the door open for future investments, though it looked unlikely at the time.

Dias, who will retire from Unifor in 2022 after leading it since 2013, said he believes that agreement with GM will be remembered as the most consequential auto agreement of his tenure. It kept the plant open and allowed both parties to move on after months of fighting that resulted in a "bloodbath," he said.

"That's probably the agreement I made that I was criticized the most for, but it was the one that will have the largest impact," Dias said.

Less than a year after vehicle assembly ended at Oshawa, GM and Unifor last November agreed to a new contract that includes up to $1.3 billion in investments at Oshawa so that it could begin building the company's Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups by 2022. GM plans to hire 1,400 to 1,700 hourly workers and will initially operate on two shifts.

Bell has appeared to make mending the company's relationship with labor a priority since becoming head of GM Canada in September 2019. For instance, in November of that year he spent a day working on the assembly line at CAMI to experience what jobs are like for the company's workers.

"It certainly hasn't been all easy street for either side over the years," Bell said. "We've been looking for the right solutions that make sense for Canada. We've had a couple big wins here recently."

Despite all of the dust-ups with GM, Dias said Canada's automotive manufacturing footprint is stronger than it has been in years.

"Bargaining with GM is always incredibly tough," he said. "Because of our personalities, we tend to clash because we're both stubborn, to be candid with you. At the end of the day, we may argue, but we found a way to come to a solution."

Dias is hopeful the repaired relationship with GM will yield further investments and product commitments in the future.

"Our relationship with GM is strong, and I think GM has won back the trust of Canadian consumers," he said. "All the stars are aligned."