Wednesday's 11:59 p.m. ET strike deadline looms as negotiations between General Motors Co. and Unifor continued at a downtown Toronto hotel.
Negotiations cover about 1,600 GM Canada workers, most of them located at the St. Catharines, Ontario., powertrain plant, which builds engines and transmissions for several models. Talks also cover workers at GM’s former Oshawa, Ontario, assembly plant, now the site of an aftermarket parts operation, and those at a parts distribution center in Woodstock, Ontario.
Both GM and Unifor have been largely silent in public about bargaining since it began in late October. Voicemails left for Unifor President Jerry Dias and other national and local union leaders on Wednesday were not returned. A request for further comment from a union spokeswoman was declined.
The union said Wednesday it has moved a news conference originally scheduled for 11 a.m. ET on Thursday to 10 a.m. ET. The schedule mirrors previous negotiations between the union and Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. In both cases, the union provided some details of the agreements it had reached with the automakers the day after the strike deadline.
When asked for comment Wednesday, GM Canada pointed to a previous statement on the negotiations, saying the company is focused on reaching a “new fair, flexible agreement” with Unifor.
A tentative agreement was reached with Ford hours following the original strike deadline in September, while a deal with FCA was struck just prior to that deadline in October. The contracts, later ratified by Unifor membership, included raises, bonuses and a reduction in the wage grow-in period for new hires, as well as more than CND$3 billion in combined investment plans in the companies’ unionized Canadian facilities.
Unifor seeks to pattern an eventual contract with GM off of the ones it recently agreed to with Ford and FCA. Those contracts were three years in length instead of four, as had been the standard in recent rounds of negotiations. The union wanted a three-year deal this time in order to align their next negotiations with those of the UAW in the United States.
Dias has previously said the union’s top priority in GM talks was to secure new production to the St. Catharines plant, primarily to replace a six-speed transmission built there that the union says is set to be phased out in the next 18 months or so. The transmissions are used in the Chevrolet Equinox and Spark, according to GM.
The plant also builds V-6 and V-8 engines for various vehicles. The V-6 is used in the Chevrolet Colorado, Chevrolet Traverse and Buick Enclave, while the V-8 is used in the Silverado, GMC Sierra, GMC Yukon, Chevrolet Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade and Chevrolet Camaro, according to GM.
Should the two sides fail to reach a deal, Unifor would be in a legal strike position. A strike would halt production of those engines and transmissions, potentially impacting assembly of those models, several of which are top sellers for GM.
The negotiations also cover the Oshawa plant, where vehicle production ended in 2019. According to GM, about 265 hourly workers build aftermarket parts there, with another 189 on layoff. Another 64 hourly workers produce about 1 million masks per month under a contract GM has with the federal government.
Dias and union leadership want vehicles to eventually be built at Oshawa again and previously told Automotive News Canada that the plant’s future would be a focus of talks.
“You’ve got this incredible paint shop there. We should talk about utilizing it,” he said.
The negotiations do not cover CAMI Assembly in Ingersoll, Ontario. That plant, which builds the Chevrolet Equinox, is on a separate contract that expires in 2021.
