Caterpillar plays hard, so let’s play hardball

In March, 2008, Stephen Harper swooped into London for a photo-op at Electro-Motive Diesel.

David Olive, Opinion, The Toronto Star:

Creating what it hoped would be a plausible excuse to kill one of London’s few remaining large private-sector employers, Cat soon after taking possession of EMD presented its London workers with a proposed new contract. EMD workers were asked to accept a 50 per cent cut in pay, to an average $16.50 an hour, and their benefits would be eviscerated.

To put this in perspective, when governments bailed out General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp, they also demanded workers accept pay cuts of roughly 50 per cent. Employees of the Detroit Three automakers are now paid about $42 an hour, or what Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. pay their North American and Japanese workers.

By contrast, the relocated EMD jobs will pay $15 to $19 an hour for high-skill work akin to auto-making.

When EMD employees predictably balked at being stripped of a decent living wage, Cat made clear that its offer was take-it-or-leave-it. On New Year’s Day it locked out workers. Five weeks later, it fired them. Which meant that previous months of “bargaining” with the employees’ union, the Canadian Auto Workers, had been a farce.

In shutting down EMD, Cat didn’t tender the customary warning to the union or to local government, Queen’s Park or Ottawa — from which a Cat-owned EMD only last year received a $5 million federal subsidy hand-delivered by Stephen Harper during a factory visit.

We could nationalize EMD, for which there is abundant precedent across the continent. America’s third-largest bank, biggest insurer and dominant home-mortgage guarantors are now wards of the state.

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