So sorry next generation autoworker

Factory jobs are available for $20.42 an hour to start with full benefits, paid vacation and a pension plan. Do you take them? Of course you do! Those jobs are hard to come by.

The job is physically draining but the overtime hours make up for the pain on pay day, until your partner next to you shows you their pay stub.  They have made a lot more money than you and they never work any overtime. Is your pay wrong? You ask them to help explain why yours is different; the explanation is disheartening.

Unifor and Fiat Chrysler ratified a four year contract this fall. The priorities for this contract were to help secure future investment here in Canada. The automotive industry in Windsor has seen some serious setbacks but is picking back up since its plummet in 2009. With a lot of the industry being shipped out of the country to places like Mexico and the southern United States, Unifor had an extremely difficult time negotiating during this round of bargaining.

“Ensuring the pattern was followed by Fiat Chrysler was no easy feat, and it was down to the wire, but we did it,” said Jerry Dias, Unifor national president.

Although this new agreement sees significant commitments on the part of FCA to invest in plants here in Canada, many new employees are feeling the sting. New hires will only make a percentage of the starting hourly base rate of $34.03. The new ten-year grow-in grid at the Windsor Assembly Plant will have new employees taking ten years to reach this full wage. Some employees agree that when you start a new job you have to work your way up, but ten years to get there seems pretty extreme.

“Everyone has to put their time in. Every job is like that,” said Jeff Gherasim, a WAP employee with 28 years seniority.

Gherasim says he thinks the wage grow-in period should only take a couple years.

“When I started it only took me a year and a half to reach full wage,” said Gherasim. “I understand times have changed, but 10 years is not right.”

Erica Simon, a recent hire with just over two years seniority, would have been happy with a six-year grow-in period.

“It sucks it is 10 years before I see full wage. That’s a decade before I make equal pay to others,” says Simon.

Simon says she has had two other long-term jobs, one non-union job and a government job. Both started at a lower rate of pay.

“How can you not feel slighted or ripped off in the long term,” said Simon.

Gherisam and Simon have worked side by side for a while now and both notice the awkwardness among employees in separate wage classifications.

“I notice the change in morale, especially on paydays, but no one really talks about it,” said Ghersiam.

He says the difference is about $500 to $700 on average per week.

Simon says it is disheartening when she sees the difference in pay.

“I have to work six days a week, three of them being 12 hour shifts, just to make what original hires make in their regular 40 hours,” says Simon. “I am not trying to be greedy but that is my reality. I have to work longer and harder to make the same.”

Coupled with this is the new pension plan for new hires. Fiat Chrysler original hires have a point system pension funded completely by the company. This means if you work your regular work week at the end of your 30 year employment you will collect your full pension at about $3500 per month. New hires on the other hand have to take a mandatory four per cent of their already lower rate to pay for their pension and the company will contribute the equivalent.

Working side by side with someone for whom the company pays their full pension when you are not entitled the same benefit is a tough pill to swallow. Original hires, according to Gherisam, would have never taken that deal.

“No way, no one would have voted in favour, no one would have voted at all,” says Gerisham, “we would have just walked out.”

Scoring a job at the Windsor Assembly Plant used to be the ‘be all, end all’ of jobs.  It was widely the belief that if you got hired there you were set for life.  Now with the landscape of the automobile industry here in Canada drastically changing, that belief for the next generation autoworker is fizzling out.