Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Auto job losses are felt by whole communities

In the glory days, 62 new Crown Victorias and Grand Marquis would roll out every hour from the Ford plant in St. Thomas, Ont.

This was the region’s economic centre, where 3,300 workers once built future police cars and taxis and, for some reason, cars for ordinary people in Florida. Florida loved the Crown Vic. No one knows why.

But when Ford left town 15 months ago, the effects reached far beyond the layoffs of its 1,900-plus remaining workers. A whole community suffered — no surprise there — and the nature of Ontario’s overall economy made another incremental shift away from manufacturing.

Which is why Bob Hammersley, the CEO of the St. Thomas and District Chamber of Commerce, felt a familiar shock when he heard Thursday’s news that General Motors will stop making Camaros in Oshawa, and move production of the next-generation Camaro to Lansing, Mich. Early estimates say this could cost roughly 1,000 jobs in Oshawa.

Details of the GM move are still unknown. This would cut out about one quarter of the Oshawa plant’s employment, not all of it. And in the two years leading to that change, there’s a chance that GM will choose to build another vehicle in the Camaro’s place. Maybe. (Former autoworkers’ chief Buzz Hargrove didn’t sound confident, noting in a TV interview that “it really does throw a wet blanket on Christmas.”)

It’s worth noting that the announcement comes just days after Michigan weakened the role of unions.

All this brought some familiar but puzzling reaction: Sure, commentators said, those greedy, fat-cat unions have to realize they can’t keep jobs here when someone overseas will work for pennies. They seem to mean this is a good thing.

If Oshawa loses 1,000 GM jobs, doesn’t it also lose far more? What about all the smaller suppliers of brake pads and airbags and plastic mouldings? What about the many stores and services that help those workers spend their money? Clothes, computer games, restaurant meals, home repairs, and of course cars. ... Don’t they all lose, too? The union says the Camaro supports nine jobs outside GM for every job at the actual plant. Someone may quibble with the exact number, but clearly it’s a lot of jobs.

So, back to St. Thomas. A contact I often deal with at the University of Western Ontario lives in St. Thomas and calls it a ghost town, post-Ford. He was raised there and ought to know. He was describing the stores on Talbot Street, the main street, that have closed with the losses of the Ford plant and the surrounding industries that depended on it, and I asked him what moved in when the retail businesses left.

“Well, there’s a new methadone clinic.”

Steve Peters, former MPP and former St. Thomas mayor, says Ford and its workers had given nearly $1 million a year to the United Way.

Bob Hammersley at the Chamber of Commerce does not sugar-coat the economic fallout from Ford.

For example, the transportation industry got huge investment. For every car shipped out, he notes, there was an equal volume of parts shipped in — engines and tires and the rest. (Which is really just the law of conservation of matter, as well as economics.)

And the supporting factories. Not so little, many of them. Lear Corp. had more than 300 workers. It made all the seats for the cars, and was so closely linked to Ford that it was almost part of the company, despite being six kilometres away.

“They would be assembled in the Lear plant and then shipped in a sequence that was always prearranged, so that it just flows right into the (Ford) line. Vehicle 982 is coming off the assembly line and the seat for 982 is right here and away we go. Everything was timed to support each other within a couple of minutes,” 24 hours a day, he told me.

Lear is closed now. A castings company from London moved into its old building, a boost to St. Thomas but not really a net gain for the region.

Someone in the industry told Hammersley that a piston travelled back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border as many as nine times, from the raw materials stage through the piston and engine manufacturing and into the finished product at the car dealer’s. He worries that this smooth integration of Canadian and U.S. production will be sacrificed to American political demands.

Automakers and their jobs built Ontario into an economic powerhouse beginning with the Auto Pact of the 1960s. The pact no longer exists, but its heritage is decades of growth that gave us cities, billions of dollars in investments, support for hospitals, universities and more. If we shrug off the Oshawa Camaro builders as economic dinosaurs who can’t match Chinese workers, we are saying, in effect, that Canadian jobs don’t matter to our economy.

Sure, we should diversify, modernize. But hoping for jobs that don’t exist yet is a poor way to balance the loss of real jobs held today by real people.

Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Tom Spears

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