Requiem for a Union Town

When the telephone rang, it was about 8:30 p.m. on Monday, March 9, and Mike Melo was sitting on the couch watching TV at his parents’ home in Windsor, Ontario. The woman on the other end identified herself as the human resources manager at the stamping plant where he had worked for twelve years at a job that paid him $21 an hour. Chrysler was ordering an immediate halt to production, she told him. Neither he nor any of the shop’s other twenty-eight employees were to show up the next morning. They were laid off — effective immediately.

Melo is thirty-four years old, with dark hair, a medium build, and a goatee. He often wears a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, and carries himself with a confidence suggesting that in his youth he would have been one of the boys picking teams at the local sandlot. At his stamping plant, Aramco, owned by American auto supplier Catalina Precision Products, he was the union steward — the elected leader who represents workers in their dealings with management.

Ontario labour law dictates that terminated employees receive severance pay according to their seniority, but when termination results from a shop closure, there’s a strong risk that workers will get no severance at all. Melo felt certain Aramco was shutting down permanently. One of two plants formerly owned by a pair of local brothers, it made hood hinges, battery trays, and tail light casements for such Chrysler vehicles as the Dodge Dakota and Ram pickup trucks. Catalina had bought Aramco and the other shop, Aradco, in September 2006, hoping to get work from other manufacturers. When that plan failed, worrisome signs began to crop up: if a gear snapped in a press, managers opted to weld it back together rather than buy a new one. Instead of repairing forklifts, they parked the vehicles and forgot about them. “It was just a feeling you got,” says Melo, “that things were going downhill.”

Melo belonged to caw Local 195, the oldest automotive local in the country. Shortly after receiving the phone call, he began getting in touch with his union brothers and sisters: his vice-chair, Pat Ganney; the national representative to the caw, his good friend Mike Renaud; and dozens of others. At some point during the speed dialing, the idea of a blockade was proposed and agreed upon. “It was almost a given,” says Melo. “In this situation, here’s what you do.”

According to the union’s calculations, Catalina’s two shuttered shops owed their eighty-odd employees about $1.5 million in back pay, vacation pay, and severance. Melo and his co-workers believed the only way they’d get it was by holding the equipment at the shops hostage — in particular the Chrysler-owned moulds (commonly referred to as “tools”) that were the most valuable assets in the plants.

The workers began arriving at the Aramco parking lot around 6:30 Tuesday morning. It only had two gates, and thus only two spots accessible by tractor-trailer. The union members set about blocking these off with their North American–made vehicles. Then they dragged over some picnic benches, opened their Tim Hortons cups, and sat down for a long wait. Over at Aradco, a similar scene was unfolding.

The first of Chrysler’s trucks showed up at Aramco on Thursday. It encountered a line of workers set up across the yard entrance. For a while, the driver idled his rig in front of them, creating a standoff that looked like a small-scale Tiananmen Square. Eventually the truck left. It was early in the following week before another one showed up, this time accompanied by Windsor police cruisers. The workers again stood firm, and again the truck withdrew.

Without parts from Catalina’s two shops, Chrysler assembly lines across North America faced wide-ranging production stoppages that were certain to cost the company — already facing bankruptcy — millions of dollars a day. Six days after the protest started, the company responded, offering Local 195 a severance package of $205,000, to be distributed among shop employees entitled to vacation pay that year. Local president Gerry Farnham endorsed the deal, saying it was the best the union could hope for. But the workers disagreed; that evening, 64 percent of them rejected the offer.

At that point, Melo and other union reps began to discuss breaking into one of the plants and barricading themselves inside. Lawyers representing Chrysler and the union were arguing over whether the automaker was legally allowed to force its way into the Catalina shops. The workers knew that if a judge granted the company an injunction to enter the plants, the only way to prolong the protest would be an occupation. “We were ready to do what we had to do,” Melo says.

This was just the sort of fight Windsor had been spoiling for. A feeling of injustice pervaded the city as the recession began to take its toll. No burg in Canada is as dependent on automobile manufacturing as Windsor, where Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors have been the top three employers for years. According to the city’s manufacturers directory, some 15,000 of Windsor’s 200,000 residents work directly for a Big Three automaker or a top-tier supplier. Thousands more work for stamping plants, tool and die shops, and mould makers. And thousands of others have jobs in the health care and service sectors that come and go depending on the number of North American vehicles sold in any given year. The result is an urban ecosystem almost entirely sustained by the production of cars and trucks.