Send DCX jobs here
Gord Henderson, Windsor Star
Published: Tuesday, February 27, 2007
It takes astonishing gall to give your embattled employer the one-finger salute while it contemplates borrowing money for a major capital investment that could safeguard your job for years to come.
We don't need your stinking jobs. So no deals. That's essentially what a majority of DaimlerChrysler workers at the Brampton assembly plant told their union and the company when they rejected minor contract concessions needed to secure a $700-million investment in their plant and here in Windsor.
This Friday will mark the 20th anniversary of Chrysler's acquisition of American Motors Corporation (AMC), which brought the Brampton workforce into the Pentastar family. But it's doubtful that warbling "Happy Birthday" and blowing out candles will be high on the agenda at a plant that might just have kissed its future goodbye.
"The company is absolutely pissed with us right now and I don't blame them," Ardis Snow, Local 1285 plant chairman, told The Star's Chris Vander Doelen. "The wheels are off this train. It's derailed."
It boggles the mind that workers making $34-an-hour would indulge in brinkmanship with the Chrysler Group, a company that has lost buckets of money and could soon be auctioned off at a fire sale to be conducted by its corporate masters in Stuttgart, Germany.
It says plenty about the red-hot economy in the Brampton area, the fastest growing part of the greater Toronto region, that workers are prepared to roll the dice on their jobs in refusing to surrender some free money, 40 minutes pay per day for time not worked, and about 40 janitorial jobs.
If this were Windsor, where jobs outside the Big Three are scarce and low-paying, and where economic survival could require moving to Alberta, any sane individual would think long and hard before rejecting concessions sought by a company on the brink of being disowned and kicked out the door by a wealthy but disenchanted parent.
BLINDING GROWTH
Maybe it's different in Brampton. Maybe the blinding growth, soaring real estate values and myriad help wanted signs have convinced Brampton's DaimlerChrysler workers that they can tell their employer to get stuffed because life will go on pretty much as usual after a plant closing.
I remember Brampton when it was an attractive town of 20,000 surrounded by postcard-pretty horse farms with white picket fences and Canada's finest agricultural land. Now it's an ugly but prosperous asphalt hell zone, with a population that almost doubled from 1986 to 2001 and is set to soar from the current 440,000 to 650,000 by 2030. It begs a couple of questions: If DaimlerChrysler were to leave Brampton, poster child for urban sprawl, would anybody notice? And for how long?
Perhaps Brampton has outgrown car assembly. Perhaps it's time for DaimlerChrysler and the senior governments to reconsider pouring the better part of a billion dollars into the Brampton facility.
Don't laugh, but it could make more sense to sell the company's valuable Brampton site -- which would trigger a bidding war and a huge company windfall -- and relocate to a corner of the province where the cost of living is relatively low, housing and labour are abundant and the company already owns land and has its headquarters.
In other words, bring car assembly home and make Windsor once again the heart and soul of Chrysler production in Canada. A ridiculous pipedream? That's what some critics would call it. They claim no car maker in their right mind would locate a new plant here, given Windsor's track record of union militancy.
That might be true. But Chrysler isn't Toyota. It knows the CAW intimately and has a long history of working with the union.
No high-ranking union official could say this, since they must maintain the facade of solidarity. But if Brampton workers don't want those jobs, and it's now apparent many are prepared to try another line of work, then the least Windsor could do is roll out the welcome mat.
It would be a blessing in disguise for Brampton, which is struggling with malignant growth, massive traffic problems and inadequate infrastructure, and a miracle for Windsor with its dearth of activity and brutal jobless rate. Brampton workers who follow their assembly jobs to Windsor, as some surely would, would make fat profits by selling their homes and condos and buying dirt-cheap border real estate.
Sure. It's a wild-eyed fantasy. Product of a feverish mind. But if it works for nearly everyone involved, what's not to like?
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© The Windsor Star 2007
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