It’s 28 C and striking workers at a General Motors plant in Ingersoll, Ont., cluster around a barrel of burning wood. The fire is a nod to labour tradition, despite the September heat, as the union digs in for the first strike at a Canadian auto assembly plant since 1996.
“We know we’re in for a fight,” Gordie Todd, a 27-year veteran of the plant, which makes the top-selling Equinox, said last week. “The last three or four contracts we’ve accepted what the company’s brought to us just to keep the company going and now it’s our turn to take a little bit of that pie back.”
A lot has changed for Canada’s autoworkers since 1996. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented in 1994, bringing low-cost competitor Mexico into the flow of tariff-free auto trade on the continent. Canada lost more than 53,000 automotive jobs from 2001 to 2014 before employment rebounded slightly, according to the Automotive Policy Research Centre at McMaster University.
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