They waited three years for Stellantis to keep its promise. Now these workers feel ‘betrayed’

详细摘要

It’s unclear whether the some 2,000 assembly workers will soon face termination and where they will find their next job.

Patti Thomas felt like she’d won the lottery when she landed a full-time job in the paint shop at Stellantis’s Brampton assembly plant in 2016, just two months after giving birth to her third daughter.

At the time, she was 36, had a university degree in social work, and was making $20 an hour as a director at a youth shelter, with no benefits or pension plan.

The Stellantis offer was her ticket to the kind of stability she’d grown up seeing in her own family. Her grandfather and great-grandfather had worked in the auto industry, as had her parents, who took pride in building cars at the very same Brampton plant, earning good union wages and a pension.

For seven years, Thomas followed in their footsteps, sealant gun in hand, bending and reaching over vehicles for eight to 12 hours a day, six days a week. The work was gruelling, but she took home a paycheque large enough to support her three daughters as a single mom.

That chapter came to an end in late 2023 when Stellantis announced plans to retool the Brampton plant to build the next-generation Jeep Compass electric SUV. After three years of waiting, she and some 2,000 fellow workers found their futures thrown into uncertainty when Stellantis confirmed this week that it planned to sell the idled plant to Canadian armoured-vehicle maker Roshel.

It’s unclear whether the assembly workers will soon face termination and where they will find their next jobs. On Thursday, Unifor national president Lana Payne said she feels the sale to Roshel was essentially final.

“We have a sale of a plant and everybody in the country says they didn’t want to have a sale of a plant, and yet here we are. The plant has been sold,” Payne said.

Roshel CEO Roman Shimonov told the Star Tuesday that the federal government supports his plans for the plant, and that his company does not consider itself bound by any of Stellantis’s obligations to its workers.

But on Thursday, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly formally notified Stellantis that the plant sale…

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