End of an era for my hometown.
On Nov. 26, 2018, General Motors announced plans to “unallocate production” by December 2019 to Oshawa Assembly, which made the Chevrolet Impala; Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, where the Chevrolet Volt, Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac CT6 are produced; Lordstown Assembly in Lordstown, Ohio, which made the Chevrolet Cruze compact; Baltimore Operations in White Marsh, Maryland; and Warren Transmission Operations in Warren, Michigan.
And now, December has truly arrived.
Unifor Local 222 is set to lose roughly two thirds of its membership due to the end of 112 years of auto assembly in Oshawa sometime next week. The McLaughlin Motor Car Company, incorporated on Nov. 20, 1907, began automobile manufacturing the following month in December 1907 – 112 years ago this month – in Oshawa, producing 154 McLaughlin-Buick Model F cars – called McLaughlins – with Buick engines that first year.
The last truck will roll of the assembly line the week before Christmas, as GM stops production in Oshawa of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra full-size, light-duty trucks, the last of which were being shipped from Indiana for final assembly in Oshawa. The end of production will leave about 2,300 workers unemployed. Unifor Local 222 president Colin James says the local is re-evaluating its future and potentially downsizing from its union hall on Phillip Murray Avenue in Oshawa.
GM will continue to manufacture parts and employ about 300 workers people at its sprawling soon-to-be-very-underused Oshawa plant, stamping parts for GM and, potentially, suppliers. The automaker has made a 10-year commitment to build parts, such as quarter panels, trunks, doors and hoods at the plant. The company is also building a 55-acre (22-hectare) autonomous-and-connected-vehicle and smart technology test track on the Oshawa site.
I arrived to work at General Motors in Oshawa shortly before the halcyon days of the early 1980s when employment at GM in Oshawa would top out at more than 23,000 workers.
I spent the first of five summers, beginning in July 1976 as a Trent University-bound first year student, fresh out of Grade 13 at Oshawa Catholic High School, working in the very same GM Oshawa West Plant high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department that my dad, Bill Barker, had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.
My dad worked as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).
In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the second-longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties. I remember it because I was 13 and in Grade 8 at St. Christopher in Oshawa at the time. He also walked the picket line 15 years earlier in 1955 in the five-month UAW strike against General Motors of Canada, the longest strike against the company.
While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.
Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.
I well remember my dad’s General Motors’ ring, presented to him in 1967 for 25 years of “Loyal Service.” In fact, I have it now. My dad and mom, along with his co-workers getting their rings, took a GM-provided train trip from Oshawa to Toronto to the Royal York Hotel for dinner and the presentation by the company. After another five years of seniority in 1972, GM added a diamond to it for 30 years of service.
My first hourly-rated job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the “Rad Room” of the old North Plant across the street. My last summer job at GM was many years later in the Summer of 1992, working on the acid side of the Battery Plant.
The Canadian Automotive Museum was created in Oshawa in 1961. The city at various times has been known by mottoes that include “The City that Motovates Canada” and “The City in Motion” and, most recently, the “Automotive Capital of Canada.”
While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, Manitoba where I live now, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.
The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.
Instead of going to INCO or Vale, as the company is now, and down into a mine, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in.
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