[manny_santos]

Someone in the media needs to ask Ken Lewenza how he plans to keep the plant's compensation competitive in the global economy.

The CAW is acting like it doesn't even want to compete. They think that companies should extend the contract out of the goodness of their hearts. Well, guess what, Caterpillar is a for-profit company. The shareholders, rightly or wrongly, expect a certain return on their investments.

The problem is, the company is stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they don't do something about the costly London plant, shareholders are going to pounce. That could include wiping out the current management at the next annual meeting.

I don't agree with how Caterpillar is handling this, but Ken Lewenza has done the workers no favours with his no-negotiation attitude. I don't think he truly cares about the workers. If he did, he would be doing everything possible to ensure these people will still be employed. At the end of the day, if this plant closes and these 700 people are out of work, nobody at the CAW loses their job or gets their salaries cut.

Everyone here can probably tell that I am not a pro-union person. I have never been part of a union, although I have worked in a unionized environment once, in support staff at Western. Some of the UWO Staff Association members there had nothing but contempt for the non-unionized student part-time employees. We were blamed for anything that went wrong by the full-time employees, although our bosses fortunately didn't take their accusations at face value. After I left, the UWOSA even demanded a reduction in work studies and student employment throughout the university as part of their new CBA. They won, and a sizable number of students lost their campus jobs mid-year or had their hours cut back by 75%. In one case I was aware of, a student didn't have the funds to pay all of the rest of her tuition because she didn't qualify for OSAP and was depending on student employment to help pay for tuition, and her parents couldn't help her very much. Also, because the CBA for support staff has a maximum number of hours per week and the number of student employees is severely capped, some Western residences no longer were staffed at night. I don't know if that is still the case now.

My grandfather, who was a business manager in his heyday and was widely considered to be very just and fair, was physically assaulted by a union organizer.

These have been my experiences with unions. I sure hope it's not like this in the rest of the unionized world.