GM closing Oshawa plant next year: union

The Canadian Auto Workers union says General Motors is going ahead with plans to close its consolidated plant in Oshawa, Ont.

The union says it’s been told the facility — the older part of the Oshawa car plant — will close by June 1, 2013, and says that could mean 2,000 layoffs. About 600 of those could be gone by the fall.

President of CAW Local 222 president Chris Buckley says GM gave the union notice on Friday.

“We continue to lose good paying jobs,” he said. “In my opinion, you can’t help but have a negative impact on the City of Oshawa.

Some workers took the news better than others.

“We’ve known it all along it was coming,” said GM worker Ken Smith. “They told us years ago this was going to happen. This plant was slated for closure 2008.

“We busted our asses for General Motors all those years and this is what they do to us,” said fellow worker Cheryl Patch.

The cuts will also affect other businesses including Henry’s Pizza who gets large orders from the company two to three times a month.

“They order about two to three times a month here. Each order they would order about $600  to $700,” said Marius Kazimi.

CityNews reporter Andrea Piunno is in Oshawa reporting on the closure. Read her live tweets below:

The plant produces the Chevrolet Impala and the Equinox.

GM also has a flex assembly plant in Oshawa that is getting a share of the production of the new Chevy Impala.

That flex line currently employs 2,000 people and currently makes the Chevy Camaro, Buick Regal and soon, the Cadillac XTS.

The Impala will also be built at GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant in Michigan.

GM is scaling back its overall operations in Canada as part of a North American restructuring begun two years ago under bankruptcy court protection.

That streamlining led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs at the company’s Canadian and U.S. operations and the shutdown of several plants.

In Canada, GM has already closed a truck plant in Oshawa and a transmission factory in Windsor, Ont.

GM Canada currently employs more than 10,000 people across the country. In its heyday, the automaker had more than twice that total and major operations in Oshawa, St. Catharines, Ont. and Windsor.

With files from CityNews

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