The closing of the GM plant in Oshawa is another in a long list of examples of capitalism at work. Worker’s and their unions just don’t get it. GM will close one of their most efficient and award-winning plants at the end of 2019 – end of story. The decision is based on costs not awards or quality. Gerry Diaz makes a lot of noise but he should be the one who knows best how corporations operate having been in the business for a long time.

For the past century the model of capitalist corporations has been exactly the same – make huge profits by cutting your costs to the bone, charging as much money as you can get away with including taking all the corporate welfare that you can while crying poor and increasing the efficiency of your production. The Robber Barons of the early 20th century were a primitive prime example. Today we live in the era of the technological Robber Barons. The names of Morgan, Getty and Vanderbilt have been replaced by Gates,  Zuckerberg and Bezos. There has over the last 50 years been a significant increase in the size of companies and profits. They have perfected cost reductions by paying worker’s subsistence wages with no healthcare, pensions or other befits, eliminating full-time work and globalizing labour. When cheaper labour or other costs show up anywhere in the world they cut production, cut staff and cut out, yet Diaz rails away as though he is going to change GM’s mind and save the worker’s jobs.  He would be better to give the money they spent on the Super-Bowl ad directly to the workers. Every large corporation in Canada and all over the world operates the same way. He’s dreaming in technicolour. The closure is an amoral business decision and the signing of a renewed NAFTA deal was the last nail in the coffin for Ontario automotive workers. When GM can pay Mexican workers a pittance compared to what they pay Ontario’s workers it’s a no-brainer. All Diaz needs to look at is across the border in Detroit. Michigan used to be the automotive capital of the world – now it’s an ugly rust belt of shuttered factories that not even the wizardry of Donald Trump will never bring back. From Electrolux to Kraft’s marshmallow factory the story is always the same. Corporate capitalism is a brutal, predatory system that places profits before people and the company before commitments.

What I don’t understand is the why the government, workers and their unions accept these premises so readily and have yet to learn their lesson. They have all drunk the Kool-Aid. They are still thinking in 1950s terms while the world has moved on. They have been walking into this “job’s trap” for decades. They are the losers in every negotiation with big corporations who constantly wring more and more concessions out of the unions and governments to bring the jobs to Canada. Corporations have been playing this game globally and governments have willingly acquiesced. Instead of banding together and raising corporate taxes they capitulate. At some point corporations finally close the business and move it somewhere cheaper in the globalized government casino lottery that we live in today. Governments always like to be there when the jobs are coming and are absent when they are leaving. Why don’t governments sign ironclad agreements with heavy financial penalties for failures to deliver streetcars like Bombardier or when they close plants like GM with full repayment clauses before giving them taxpayers money. GM was nearly bankrupt in 2008 before the Ontario government stepped in with $11 Billion in emergency funds to save the company. Why didn’t’ the governments extract serious legal commitments  from GM then to pay back the money with interest and to remain in Ontario? Theh government would have been better to give the $11 Billion directly to the workers paying them all $3.3 million. When the private sector cuts deals with governments like the Saudi’s the financial penalties are prohibitively heavy to cancel the contract. When will workers realize that unless they change the economic rules they’re going to get shafted every time. When are they going to learn that it is the capitalist system that runs this way and it will never change. Worker’s eagerly voted in Doug Ford with the same blind trust and glee that he was “for the people” and are only now realizing it was all a dupe. From Cami-Ingersoll, Heinz, Maple Leaf Foods, Inglis and on and on plant closures happen over and over. Until workers start electing different governments that will change the rules and have their interests in mind – line up at the food stamps window and pass another Looney beer.