Skilled Trades Association, CAW Local 199 St. Catharines (General Motors Unit) | ||||||
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This letter was written in response to the January the 7th, 2005 article in the Niagara This Week paper entitled “Growing times for region, says think tank”. In the fourth paragraph they state; “According to the report, manufacturing output will see a near 12 percent jump due to General Motors announcing it will invest $116 million into its St. Catharines engine plant. The money and 100 new employees will develop parts for a modern fuel-efficient transmission that will begin to be used in 2007 GM models” It seems the only research for this segment of the article was from a press release that GM Canada released on the 11th of May last year. I have sent a letter to the editor of the paper. One hundred new employees at General Motors? It was with great interest that I read the article on the front page of the January 7th edition of NIAGARA this WEEK entitled “Growing times for region, says think tank”. It is wonderful to hear that things are finally looking better in this area and that the unemployment rate in the region is expected to drop from 7.4 to 6.8 percent. The information that was quoted from the report is however fatally flawed. The $116 million investment in GM St. Catharines operations for the transmission work at the engine plant is certainly welcome but far from creating jobs for “one hundred new employees”, it will only at best save one hundred jobs of the approximately one thousand people that are now fearing for their jobs as the present product line in the Components plant winds down. Over the next few years as the four speed automatic transmission is phased out, the volumes at that plant will decrease and without new work, the fate of the plant is certain. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government states that for every job that is lost in the auto industry in Niagara, seven jobs are lost in the community. That’s a potential loss of seven thousand jobs that our region can not and should not accept. The people that sit in their ivory towers creating these studies in Ottawa need to be cognisant of what is happening within the four walls of our facilities in St. Catharines. You can not get all of the facts for a report such as this, from reading a press release. There are already 47 skilled trades and 323 production workers on permanent layoff from GM St. Catharines at this time. We need a major investment in our city from the corporation in order that our children and our community as a whole can benefit in the future. At this point, the corporation is letting it’s operations in this city wither away and we can not sit idly by, too much is at stake. Kind regards, Bob Bowman | ||||||
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