At the eleventh hour and just before strike action was due to start on 20 September, management at US carmaker General Motors (GM) and the Unifor union clinched a deal set to run for four years. Unifor secured an investment commitment from GM to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars for three facilities in Ontario, Oshawa, St. Catherines, and the car parts distribution center at Woodstock. This is indeed good news for the country as Canadians consistently find themselves losing out to Mexico and the United States.
Unifor negotiators managed to secure both higher wages and bonuses for their 3,900 GM Ontario members. They also succeeded in transitioning 700 temporary employees over to full time employment contracts. However the survival of the very facilities was their main priority.
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