To all 88 members. I cannot keep up with all the texts and emails i am getting due to todays announcement of the extended time needed for us to fully launch and get to 3 shifts.
By our contract the top 400-450 would work the entire time when 1 shift comes back.
In that scenario we would have over 600 members with $0, no EI, no SUB no IMP by mid March.
We are working on finalizing all the details for this return to work program.
The senior members can all elect to work every week if they want, full pay, just like the contract states.
The non top 1/3 workers, those who would otherwise be laid off until minimum of October will now work 2 weeks and then collect minimum of 60% IMP for 4 weeks – that is an average of 73% wages every 6 weeks plus full health care. That is compared to $0 for over 600 members.
We are also working on a whole host of options for everyone to consider from January until October. We will have a video out later next week to describe this in more detail. It is then my intention to allow everyone to come to the Union Hall from 8am until 8pm, 2 consecutive days and every hour on the hour we will go through the entire agreement and give everyone the opportunity to decide what is best for them and their families.
People are asking me why they didn’t get to vote? We did, in our last contract and we are holding to the contract as our top senior members can elect to work each week, rotate or even stay home. We will go over these options.
This is a decent agreement made in very tough circumstances. GM as well as all of us want to produce these new trucks ASAP, but we cannot without all the required parts. The entire world continues to churn slowly and almost every auto plant continues to take heavy down weeks due to chip and parts shortages, we just don’t see that as we are not working.
We all expected to be back working this winter at some point. We do have extremely strong sales and GM want and need to deliver our new trucks.
We will be the first auto plant in Canada to produce 100% fully electric vehicles, combined with all the parts issues world wide, this is another growing pain. We seem to be handed tough situation after tough situation.
We will have much more details later next week. Everyone just take a breath and give us a week.
Mike Van Boekel
You can watch the company video here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CAMIAssembly