Frequently Asked Questions.

Ask your question below if you can't find it here.

What does “public ownership” mean?

• Public ownership means that particular workplace, business or facility is legally owned by one or a mix of levels of government: municipal (local); provincial or federal. Plans for what it produces (or its activities), are decided by managers/a board (and possibly workers), responsible to citizens, rather than a set of private investors, only interested in getting “competitive” returns on their investments (in other words – profits). The actual goals of such a corporation are subject to some kind of democratic process for their development. That is much different than private enterprise.
• Public ownership provides an opportunity to serve the needs of the majority of working people who would use the service or goods that are produced there, and those that work in the facilities. The only way to take advantage of this opportunity, it to organize workers, people in the communities, technical experts, environmentalists and those who will be using the goods or services produced.
• Having public enterprises that constantly lose money and waste resources is not what we are looking for. Being relatively effective and efficient isn’t necessarily in conflict with respecting the legitimate rights and needs of workers and the users/recipients of the goods or service produced. Contrary to the folk ‘wisdom’ and common sense of today’s business class, publicly owned activities aren’t necessarily wasteful or bureaucratic or less effective than privately-owned business. The latter have their own forms of waste, which are tied to the private market model.
• Public ownership of a given private enterprise can be accomplished by passing a law taking it over. It can be done in a way that is “friendly” to existing private owners (buying it, for example), or in a more confrontational way (taking it over without compensation, exerting the principle that citizens have already ‘paid’ for the assets with subsidies and labour). There can also be a combination of the two.​

What product would you build?

• The obvious product for Oshawa to produce would be electric vehicles for Canada Post and other government fleets. Related products, such as parts and power trains for those vehicles, or other sustainable energy production is possible. Currently, we’re sponsoring a feasibility study to come up with reality-based suggested products.​
• As well, we would want to produce something that would contribute to the move towards sustainable production and reduction and elimination of processes and products that contribute to climate change and other dangerous forms of pollution – the reason we use the term “green” in our product.
• As key element in this process, would have to be asking surrounding communities, technical experts, workers and environmentalists, to help develop a list of green products that we need, and therefore, could become the basis of new production at the facility.

Who would own the facility?

• Most likely, it would be one or more levels of government, setting up a board, but being owned by the governments.
  
• It is theoretically possible to have private partners, but they would have to be a smaller component of the ownership structure.

How can we keep equipment that belongs to GM?

There are two ways to answer this:

• The entire production facility, and most of the profits gained by the sale of cars, trucks and parts come from both workers and the larger community. Our labour – and the labour of our parents and their parents - built that plant and the products coming out of it, for over 100 years. Plus, the subsidies from governments – paid for from the taxes of working people and other people in communities across the country – paid for the continuation of GM’s production, during the difficult years of bankruptcy and competition. We “own” that plant and have a collective right to use it to produce useful goods for the larger community, rather than destroyed or moved to make way for lucrative land sales for condos and other such stuff. The rights of private investors often come into conflict with the rights and needs of workers and communities (such as when we enforce health and safety standards, pollution and mileage rules). Remember, when we look at the history of our union, GM and other corporations used to fight tooth and nail against unionization, claiming that “unions are an illegal way of trying tell us what to do with OUR property”. Nuff said!
• Theoretically, a settlement might include some kind of compensation to GM for its equipment. Not likely, but possible.

Why would the government help - they didn’t last time?

• They wouldn’t do it on their own. We have to build a movement to force them, politically, to do so. There are arguments we can use – both to win workers and community residents over – and there are arguments we’d need to convince governments, but the latter would require petitions, lobbying, demonstrations, rallies and perhaps direct actions at the workplace. Further, we need to produce a rational case that the existing facility could be used to produce a green product, and that government could organize and provide the resources, with workers and environmentalists, to make it happen.
  
• Without the resources of government(s), this project can’t really go forward. If successful, it could provide a base for further efforts to keep other workplaces from closing and contribute to the birth and growth of a green manufacturing sector that could hire workers from the fossil-fuel driven sectors and produce goods that communities in this country need. Private enterprise would only produce what is most likely to bring in competitive profit levels, and that points away from the type of production we are proposing.
  
• Municipal government might be the most open, but the federal government is also looking to get re-elected and claims to be interested in facilitating “infrastructure” development.

Why would a government want to run a business?

• Governments are and have been involved in enterprises that produce both goods as well as services for almost a century. Governments owned Dehavilland (aircraft); public transit equipment (Canada Car in Thunder Bay); Airlines (Air Canada); Electrical generation; public transit; Rail; mining, telecommunications; oil and gas (remember Petrocanada?) etc. Today, there are still 49 Crown Corporations – owned by governments and engaged in activities one can call “running a business”.
• Why would governments do this? There are a number of reasons:
  • Private investors don’t want to invest in certain kinds of services or products, because they can’t make enough of a profit. Governments can get involved, because of public need. This is why governments owned enterprises that produced aircraft, transportation equipment, oil and gas service.
  • Private companies, with the drive to bring in the highest returns and competitiveness, couldn’t deliver the goods or services that were needed. This is why public transit, medical care and electricity were nationalized.
  • The cost of developing and maintaining certain services are too expensive for private investors and owners and are developed and maintained by governments: postal service, hydro, key research areas in pharmaceuticals, defense, environment, and all kinds of things;
• Many of the government-owned enterprises have been sold off to the private sector- not because the private sector is more efficient or better at getting needed goods or services produced and delivered to people who need them – but because they have the potential for provide profitable returns to private investors. This is referred to as “privatization”.
• Privatization has not led to lower costs to users, or more effective services or better or more valuable goods. It has led to massive profits and accumulated wealth, based partly on pressuring workers and subjecting them to the insecurities of private competition.
  • Think of the deregulation and partial privatization of hydro; telecommunications (run by a small number of huge corporations); air travel, energy, etc.
• Governments could become the owner of a new Oshawa-based facility, based in the old GM plant, producing transportation equipment that private investors don’t want or can’t get involved in, because the relative returns aren’t high enough, or they can make more by building condos and shopping plazas. But that won’t happen without building a movement, with a reasonable set of plans, to pressure them to do so.
  

• We are not suggesting that the facility can mass produce electric vehicles for personal use – competing with the large multinational auto companies. They do require a massive remake of the infrastructure of fueling which doesn’t exist yet. But the reasons we’re not arguing for that kind of production is that it requires massive investments – the kind that the large auto giants are making – and, involves extremely competitive markets, which in turn, require deep cost reduction agendas.
  
  
• We are looking at specialty electric vehicles, that can be used by governments and delivery businesses, that have refueling capacities. They could serve smaller markets, that require flexibility and smaller vehicles, like those being used by the post office today. We are hoping that this would be part of a larger transition away from fossil fueled vehicles by government services.
  

How can we make the government take over the plant and equipment?

• It will take building a movement, which involves a number of elements:
  • Winning over co-workers, at GM and especially the supplier units and plants;
  • Building a base of support in surrounding communities;
  • Involving the environmental movement, engineers and other technical experts
  • Getting support from other groups of workers, losing their jobs or in danger of losing them, due to plant closures and corporate obsession with competitiveness and cost reduction. They can help build this into a model that they can use in strategically thinking about how to transform their own workplaces in a similar manner.
• Engaging in a campaign to pressure governments to take ownership and provide resources for a green transformation of the workplace and serving as a market for the products.
  • A campaign involves education, rallies, mobilization, and winning over support from potential political allies in city government, as well as federal and provincial parties, such as within the NDP, Greens and Liberals.
    

When has this ever happened in Canada?

• It hasn’t – but, there are precedents for some of elements of this project:
  • Governments forced privately-owned auto and aircraft producers to make weapons for the war effort in WWI and respond to the planning directives of the government (in the US and Canada);
  • In the early 1990’s, in response to a closure of a Caterpillar Plant in Toronto, a plant occupation and campaign, led to the founding of the Green Work Alliance, which argued for a re-opening of the facility, producing green products, and later advocated for similar approaches to further workplace closures.
• We could be the first successful effort to apply this model to creating green jobs, and freeing working people from the power of large multinational private corporations for our jobs.
  

What can we do, we’re just regular workers?

• We are the key to make this happen. ‘Regular’ workers are the backbone of the plant – across a number of generations – who built the facility, and our labour created the products that were made here. Our collective power and activism created UAW (and later CAW) local 222 in Oshawa, which was one of the cornerstones of the Canadian labour movement. Through our collective mobilization, along with allies in the community and elsewhere, we have the potential to create a new model of production and job creation in Oshawa.
  

Why hasn’t the union thought of this since it’s so doable?

• To be honest, we know that this might be doable, but it is a very new project, and goes way beyond the traditional way that we tend to think about how to deal with plant closures. The same is true for the union – both the national leadership and the local.
  • They attempted to influence the negotiations for a new NAFTA, but, regardless of their efforts, the right of corporations to move across border was not affected;
  • They waged a public campaign to challenge GM’s planned closure (including calls for boycotts of Mexican-made vehicles), but ultimately had no real effects. GM was committed to a larger strategic move – that included closures of key facilities, and ultimately, a move to electric cars, made in the cheapest venue.
  • In the end, they negotiated the best possible commitment from GM – which amounted to very little and a probably non-existent future. As well, they worked to get severance packages and possible preferential hiring. Keeping in mind, there is precious little for the supplier workers
• They never even considered the validity of our project, because they started and remain linited with an approach which is locked into dependence on GM and the other multinational corporate employers. So many of us who have been dependent on GM all these years, have a difficult time thinking that we can do something different. We would have hoped that the union leadership would have the creativity, political vision and courage to try to break that dependence. (The same kind of courage and vision that organized the 1937 strike, and later led to the rejection of free trade and concessions in the 1980s and helped us break away from the US-led UAW). We were disappointed.
• We respect what they have tried to do and accomplished, but we need to go in a different direction in order to have even a chance to create green jobs and use the productive facilities that we and our predecessors have built over the decades. Hopefully, we can inspire other union activists and leaders to move in the same direction as us.

Would it be just us members involved, or do we have other people interested in doing this?

• We would need a coalition of union members at Oshawa and the suppliers, with other workers across the union movement, people in our surrounding communities, engineers, technicians, academics, environmentalists, our families, and political allies.
• The first step is to build a base of support within our local union, in the plant and suppliers. We need to be the foundation of the fight for our future here. There is no other road forward. Most of us who are not retiring face a life of crappy, low-paying jobs in service, a future we want to avoid. Only a handful of us can open our own businesses and survive (most fail). This project is one of the few possible ways to provide a future worth fighting for.
  

Why should we care about "green" projects?

• There is a jobs crisis for those of us who are not retiring when the plant is scheduled to close. There is also a climate crisis, that we and our families are facing, driven by the use of fossil fuels for energy. Future manufacturing will require both the production of non-polluting and renewal energy-made goods and materials, and processes that don’t require fossil-fueled power and methods. If we want decent, stable and good jobs in manufacturing we’ll need to move in this direction. This project is a way of doing that.
  

---