Angry employees shut down a General Motors (GM) plant in Ontario for three hours to protest the impending closure of a truck assembly line, a union spokesman said on Saturday.
Workers have been blocking the company’s Canadian head office since Wednesday, but early on Saturday morning, about 100 people took to their cars and drove in a slow convoy around the truck and car plants.
Union spokesman Keith Osborne said trucks delivering parts could not get in, forcing a shutdown that lasted three hours.
“General Motors experienced a little bit of heartburn today,” said Canadian Auto Workers Local 222 president Chris Buckley. “That’s nothing compared to what 2,600 of my members feel every day right now. It’s a lot more than heartburn.”
Buckley said the union would only take legal protest measures for now.
GM spokesman Stew Low confirmed that the plant had lost production as a result of the convoy on Saturday.
“I would certainly hope that there won’t be any more interruptions of production,” he said. “It’s important that we build the orders that customers have given us.”
GM announced this week that it was closing Oshawa and three other pickup truck and sport utility vehicle factories as US$4 per gallon gas (US$1.06 per liter) has caused sales to tumble. The Oshawa truck assembly line employs 2,600 hourly and 300 salaried workers.
CAW president Buzz Hargrove said on Friday that the automaker committed to keeping the Oshawa plant open in a contract agreement on May 15, which also included a promise that the truck plant would build a new hybrid truck, giving them work until at least 2011.
Hargrove met on Friday with GM brass at the company’s headquarters in Detroit in what union officials described as a tense 90-minute meeting, resulting in GM refusing a union demand to keep the truck plant open past next year.
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