For an international strategy to win the CAMI workers strike
By
the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter
19 September 2017
The World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter calls on autoworkers throughout Canada, the United States and Mexico to mobilize in support of the strike by 2,800 GM Canada workers at the CAMI assembly in Ingersoll, just east of London, Ontario.
The CAMI workers have shut the assembly lines at one of the most productive and profitable facilities in GM’s North American manufacturing empire. Workers at the factory are subjected to relentless speed up, labouring three shifts a day, six days a week to produce 300,000 of GM’s hot-selling and lucrative Equinox sports utility vehicles annually.
This is the first strike at CAMI in a quarter of a century and the first at one of the Detroit-based automakers in Canada since the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) briefly struck GM in 1996. The Ingersoll factory, which operates under a separate labour agreement, has repeatedly been used to set concessionary benchmarks that are then used to extort rollbacks from workers across the Detroit Three’s plants.
CAMI workers have said enough is enough to speed-up, multi-tier wages, the expansion of “temp” positions, and the corporate assault on jobs. Since the financial crash and GM’s 2008-09 restructuring, autoworkers across North America have seen their living standards continue to plummet even as GM sits on a cash hoard of $22 billion and showers its top investors and executives with billions in dividends and stock buybacks.
But CAMI workers cannot fight this corporate giant alone. The company is already making plans to ramp up production at other factories in Canada, the US and Mexico to offset the impact of the strike. GM has the backing of all the corporate-controlled…