DURHAM, Ontario—The news that General Motors is closing its Oshawa assembly plant has left workers at nearby auto-parts plants dreading layoffs.
The Unifor union says layoffs could hit more than 2,700 of its members at GM “feeder plants,” including 377 at Ceva Logistics in Oshawa, 353 people at Lear in Whitby, and 200 at Inteva in Whitby, as well as the 2,700 projected to lose jobs at Oshawa. None of these companies have announced layoffs yet, but GM is their sole customer. “Oh my god, we can’t do this again, because we already lost our jobs once,” said Trisha Lyons, 45, a forklift driver at Ceva whose husband works at Lear. “It’s taken us 10 years to get back what we lost.” “The public is not fully aware of how much of an impact this is going to have on workers and their families,” Brian Smith, plant chair for Unifor Local 1090 at Inteva, told the Northumberland News. “The impact is a domino effect, and it trickles out from the walls of GM and into the walls of all the feeder plants and their suppliers, to the workers and their families and the communities these individuals live in.”
