https://vimeo.com/432237797 In Oshawa Ontario, workers organize for a public takeover an unused GM plant to produce electric vehicles or supplied to fight the pandemic. Sam Gindin joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay. This is theAnalysis.news podcast. Sam Gindin So this is part two of my discussion with Sam Gindin in part one, which I urge you to listen to, if you haven't. We talk about more generally the issues of what's happening with the trade unions in this pandemic moment. And as dire as the crisis is, it's also a moment of opportunity for the mass movement and for this progressive struggle inside the unions to make the unions play a more dynamic, even leading role. There's one example of what could be a form of struggle, a model that's taking place that I think is particularly interesting. And that's in Oshawa, Ontario, where an idle GM plant is. There's a fight taking place amongst the workers there and people in the community to nationalize the plants and convert it to selling electric vehicles to the government. So it's actually a sustainable model, but so far, the federal government of Canada has not gone for it. Now joining us once again is Sam Gindin. Sam has been involved in this fight in Oshawa. And he, just for those that didn't hear Part One, Sam was the research director of the Canadian Auto Workers; now Unifor from 1970 forward to 2000. And he co-authored a Socialist Challenge Today with Leo Panitch and Steve Marr. Thanks for joining us again, Sam. Sam Gindin Great to be back. Paul Jay So tell us the Oshawa story. Sam Gindin OK, I probably will have to give quite a bit of background because a lot of people won't know about it. A lot of your listeners––– Paul Jay won't know where Oshawa is. Oshawa’s just outside Toronto. Sam Gindin Yeah. Which is where I was going to start. It's just outside of Toronto. And at one point it was actually the largest auto hub that GM had in North America, one of the largest in the world. It used to have three assembly plants, that were making 750,000, 800,000 vehicles a year. It was making radiators. It was making radios. It had 23,000 workers in that community. And over time, it kept slipping down. And then a year and a half ago, GM announced its closing. And a group of us, including some autoworkers, some retirees, the president of the Labor Council, some community members, began to think about what to do. And I think we came to a few very important conclusions. One is that begging GM to bring back jobs was over. This wasn't going to happen. We had to think beyond GM, and we had to start thinking about actually think public ownership. We didn't want another private company coming and repeating this after getting a lot of subsidies. That was one thing. The second thing is we decided that we really wanted to think about going beyond the industry. We shouldn't just think about what can we do that can compete. We wanted to think about something that was socially useful, and, you know, we thought the environment was an obvious issue. We were thinking about equipment for an aging population. We ended up focusing on the environment, and we focused on electrical vehicles. But we didn't want to do this in competition with China and the US and Mexico. We wanted it to be something that was planned.
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