By Rochelle Raveendran

Copyright cbc

Rich LeTourneau is blunt as he sets down his beer on the union hall bar, located just a stone’s throw away from the General Motors plant in Fort Wayne, Ind., where he’s put in 38 years.

“I respect Canadian unions, I respect the Mexican union. We didn’t raise our hand and say … ‘I’ll take what you guys got.’ That decision was made way above our head,” he told CBC News.

“But when the company comes to me to increase volume, I’m not gonna tell them no, either, because it’s job security for my people, and hell, if I can corner the market, I will.”

LeTourneau is the bargaining chairman at United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2209, which represents GM workers in Fort Wayne. This is where GM is adding 250 temporary jobs to build Chevrolet Silverados — work that has also been happening in Oshawa, Ont. but is being scaled back.

GM announced in early April it was adding workers to its Fort Wayne plant, just days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans for a 25 per cent tariff on finished vehicles and some auto parts — targeting one of the most lucrative manufactured products sold by Canada.

A month later, GM Canada said it was cutting one of three shifts at its Oshawa Assembly; some 750 of its 3,000 workers are set to be laid off come Jan. 30, plus hundreds more throughout the surrounding supply chain.

Both the Oshawa and Fort Wayne assemblies — along with a GM factory in Silao, Mexico — build light-duty Chevy Silverado pickup trucks. Oshawa also builds heavy-duty Silverados, while Fort Wayne builds GMC Sierra pickups.

Jeff Gray is the president of Unifor Local 222, which represents workers at the Oshawa plant. He says he’s not surprised by LeTourneau’s comments.

“What if we had the opportunity in Canada to increase our volume or get different investments? Of course, we would be after that,” Gray said.

The leadership at UAW have an opportunity to capitalize on the Trump administration’s love of tariffs to create the best environment for business that they can, he said.

But Gray compared the tariff policy to a stake that’s been driven between the Canadian and American union.

“It’s not that we’re angry with UAW,” he said. “They’re our brothers, they’re our sisters.

“At the same time, we compete for business. The playing field right now is not very level, and that concerns us.”

Trump has repeatedly said the U.S. doesn’t need Canadian-made cars — a comment experts say doesn’t reflect the deep integration of the countries’ auto industries.

While the Canadian auto industry has shrunk over the past few decades, the remaining jobs in the Oshawa plant provide good pay and solid benefits that the union has fought hard for, Gray said. “If we let these jobs leave, they’re not going to come back.”

The vast majority of workers at Oshawa’s GM plant are newer to the automotive industry, including many with young families who left other careers for the chance to get decent pay, added Chris Waugh, the union’s chairperson for the plant.

GM declined to say how much it is increasing volume at Fort Wayne — and LeTourneau said it’s unlikely the company will release this number.

“I don’t think GM wants to look as though, ‘Hey, we’re taking product from other countries which are still our company,'” he said.

“Because when Oshawa closed the first time, it got a little bitter in Canada.… I remember it vividly.”

Oshawa’s auto city identity still resonates

In November 2018, GM announced it was closing its Oshawa Assembly after a century in operation as part of a global restructuring plan. At its peak in the 1980s, the Ontario plant employed around 23,000 people. By 2018, that number had dwindled to roughly 4,000.

The bitterness that LeTourneau remembers was on full display during the 2019 Super Bowl, when Unifor, representing Oshawa’s GM workers, aired a Canadian ad criticizing the closure, despite a cease-and-desist letter from the company.

After shuttering in December 2019, the plant reopened in November 2021. GM Canada spent $1.2 billion retooling the operation to resume pickup truck production, saying it was driven by increased demand for the vehicles.

Though the GM plant today is now a fraction of what it once was, there remains a perception that Oshawa is an auto city, says Dumaresq de Pencier, the exhibit and project co-ordinator for the Canadian Automotive Museum, located in Oshawa’s downtown core.

“Arguably, it is now a hospital and university town,” he said. “But that idea has a lot of resonance with people and a lot of emotional inertia — even as the city is changing very dramatically.”

The top three employers in Oshawa are health care, at 17 per cent, followed by retail trade and educational services, according to a 2024 city report. Oshawa is home to Durham College, Ontario Tech University and Trent University.

Manufacturing only employed roughly three per cent of workers last year.

GM ‘complements’ Fort Wayne: commissioner

In Fort Wayne, GM is the city’s third-largest employer — behind a hospital network and Amazon — with roughly 4,000 workers.

But unlike Oshawa, there are no sports teams that use GM as a namesake, faded murals commemorating the plant, or museums and libraries named after its founding family.

GM Canada is embedded into Oshawa’s identity — the company’s Canadian operations were born there.

But in Fort Wayne, GM “complements the fabric of the community,” says Rich Beck, commissioner of Allen County, which includes Fort Wayne.

The Fort Wayne plant opened in 1986, a few years after a different truck manufacturer left Allen County, taking with it thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Diversifying the county’s economy has been a clear strategy, Beck says.

It has also long been on the mind of Oshawa Mayor Dan Carter. But Carter says he is unwilling to accept the fading of the city’s auto and manufacturing sector.

Carter said he’s in ongoing conversations with GM Canada about the future of the Oshawa plant. Moving forward, he said the company will look to cost-cutting, innovation, productivity and product quality.

“We can’t just lean on the history of what we’ve done,” Carter said. “We absolutely have to demonstrate innovation lives here and we can answer the call in regards to those four critical areas.”

While Oshawa’s auto sector remains overshadowed by uncertainty, Trump’s tariffs have been positive for Allen County, Beck said. In the last several weeks, the county has fielded a significant increase in phone calls from foreign companies, some of whom have expressed interest in moving plants to the region.

“From that respect, the tariffs must be working or at least getting somebody’s attention,” Beck said.

Auto plants in the U.S. are also benefiting from the policy, LeTourneau said, noting he’s certain those 250 temporary jobs at the Fort Wayne GM Assembly will become permanent.

But he said demand for manufacturing jobs across 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 it is people don’t want to work six days a week,” LeTourneau said, noting the Fort Wayne plant has seen peak absentee rates of 22 per cent.

“You can bring all the manufacturing jobs you want back in the U.S., but [if] there’s nobody here to do the jobs, we got a problem.”