Rich Letourneau is blunt while putting his beer in the Union Hall Bar, located just a stone shot of the General Motors plant in Fort Wayne, Ind., Where he has put in 38 years.
“I respect the Canadian unions, respect for the Mexican union. We did not raise our hands and said … ‘I will take what they obtained.’ That decision was made above our head,” he told CBC News.
“But when the company comes to me to increase the volume, I will not tell you no, because it is job security for my people, and hell, if I can corner the market, I will.”
Letourneau is the president of Negotiation in United Auto Workers (UAW) local 2209, which represents the GM workers in Fort Wayne. This is where GM is adding 250 temporary jobs to build Chevrolet Silverados, a work that has also been happening in Oshawa, Ontario. But it is reducing.
GM announced at the beginning of April that he was adding workers to his Fort Wayne plant, a few days after the president of the United States, Donald Trump, announced plans for a 25 percent rate in the finished vehicles and some car parts, aimed at one of the most lucrative manufactured products sold by Canada.
A month later, GM Canada said he was cutting one of the three shifts in his Oshawa assembly; Some 750 of their 3,000 workers must be fired on January 30, more hundreds more throughout the surrounding supply chain.
Both Oshawa and Fort Wayne assemblies, along with a GM factory in Silao, Mexico, build Chevy Silverado Trucks Chevy Silverado. Oshawa also builds heavy -duty silverados, while Fort Wayne builds Sierra GMC trucks.
Jeff Gray is the president of local unifor 222, who represents workers at the Oshawa plant. He says he is not surprised by Letourneau’s comments.
“What would happen if we had the opportunity in Canada to increase our volume or get different investments? Of course, we would be after that,” Gray said.
UAW’s leadership has the opportunity to capitalize on the love of the Trump administration for tariffs to create the best environment for the businesses they can, he said.
But Gray compared the tariff policy with a participation that has been promoted between the Canadian and American Union.
“It’s not that we are angry with UAW,” he said. “They are our brothers, they are our sisters.
“At the same time, we compete for business. The playing field is not very level, and that worries us.”
Trump has repeatedly said It is not reflected The deep integration of the automotive industries of the countries.
Although the Canadian automotive industry has been reduced in recent decades, the remaining works in the Oshawa plant provide good salaries and solid benefits for which the union has fought hard, Gray said. “If we let these works leave, they will not return.”
The vast majority of Oshawa GM workers are newer for the automotive industry, including many with young families that left other races to obtain a decent salary, added Chris Waugh, president of the plant union.
GM declined to say how much the volume is increasing in Fort Wayne, and Letourneau said it is unlikely that the company will release this number.
“I don’t think GM wants to look like, ‘hey, we are taking products from other countries that are still our company,'” he said.
“Because when Oshawa closed the first time, he became a bit bitter in Canada … I remember it vividly.”
Oshawa’s Auto City identity still resonates
In November 2018, GM announced that it closed its Oshawa assembly after a century in operation as part of a global restructuring plan. At its peak in the 1980s, the Ontario plant used some 23,000 people. For 2018, that number had decreased to approximately 4,000.
The bitterness that Letourneau remembers was on display during the Super Bowl 2019, when Unifor, which represents the GM workers of Oshawa, representing Oshawa, transmitted a Canadian ad that criticizes the closureDespite a cessation and withdrawal letter of the company.
After closing in December 2019, the plant reopened in November 2021. GM Canada spent $ 1.2 billion in resetting the operation to resume truck production, saying that it was driven by a greater demand for vehicles.
Although the GM plant today is now a fraction of what was once, there is still a perception that Oshawa is an automotive city, says Dumaresq of Pencier, the exhibition and the project coordinator for the Canadian Automotive Museum, located in the center of Oshawa in the center of the city.
“It could be said that it is now a hospital and a university city,” he said. “But that idea has a lot of resonance with people and a lot of emotional inertia, even when the city is changing very dramatically.”
The three main employers in Oshawa are medical attention, with 17 percent, followed by retail trade and educational services, according to a 2024 City report. Oshawa is the home of Durham College, Ontario Tech University and Trent University.
Manufacturing only used approximately three percent of workers last year.
Gm ‘accessories’ Fort Wayne: Commissioner
In Fort Wayne, GM is the third largest employer in the city, behind a hospital network and Amazon, with approximately 4,000 workers.
But unlike Oshawa, there are no sports teams that use GM as homonym, faded murals that commemorate the plant, or museums and libraries that are named after their founding family.
GM Canada is integrated into the identity of Oshawa: the company’s Canadian operations were born there.
But in Fort Wayne, GM “complements the fabric of the community,” says Rich Beck, Allen County Commissioner, which includes Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne’s plant opened in 1986, a few years after a different truck manufacturer left Allen’s county, carrying thousands of manufacturing jobs.
Diversifying the county economy has been a clear strategy, says Beck.
He has also been in the minds of the mayor of Oshawa, Dan Carter. But Carter says he is not willing to accept the discoloration of the city’s car and manufacturing sector.
Carter said he is in ongoing conversations with GM Canada about the future of the Oshawa plant. In the future, he said that the company will seek cost reduction, innovation, productivity and product quality.
“We cannot rely on the story of what we have done,” Carter said. “We absolutely have to demonstrate innovation lives here and we can answer the call with respect to those four critical areas.”
While Oshawa’s automotive sector is still eclipsed by uncertainty, Trump’s tariffs have been positive for Allen County, Beck said. In recent weeks, the county has presented a significant increase in telephone calls of foreign companies, some of which have expressed interest in moving the plants to the region.
“From that sense, tariffs must be working or at least attract someone’s attention,” said Beck.
Automobile plants in the US are also benefiting from politics, said Letourneau, and noted that they are sure that these 250 temporary works in the GM Assembly of Fort Wayne will become permanent.
But he said that the demand for manufacturing jobs throughout the country is not the same as it was when he started working at the Fort Wayne plant decades ago.
“There is a different mentality in the workforce today … part of this is that people do not want to work six days a week,” Letourneau said, noting that Fort Wayne plant has seen maximum absence rates of 22 percent.
“You can bring all the manufacturing work you want in the US. [if] There is no one here to do the jobs, we have a problem. “
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