Take the Plant, Save the Planet

Editor: A Canadian Green New Deal!

October 20, 2019

Creating Good Jobs, Making Sustainable Products, Challenging Climate Change

GM’s bosses are closing the auto plant in Oshawa but workers want to repurpose it to create good jobs and produce green and sustainable energy products. Join us for a discussion with Linda McQuaig (author and journalist), James Hutt (Leap Manifesto), Rebecca Keetch (autoworker, Green Jobs Oshawa), Tony Leah (autoworker, Green Jobs Oshawa) and Fred Hahn (CUPE Ontario). Also poetry reading by Giovanna Riccio. Moderated by Paul Gray.

Show solidarity with Green Jobs Oshawa, make public ownership of the Oshawa plant an election issue.

GM Oshawa was once the home of the largest auto facility on the continent. GM no longer wants it, aside from a small project that might at most, provide 300 jobs. But workers do, and they have plans for it. The Oshawa plant could create many more good, sustainable jobs, by converting the facility into a manufacturing hub for electric vehicles and other sustainable energy products. This requires that governments step in, and have democratic public ownership replace corporate ownership and make products that challenge climate change. To make this possible we need to show solidarity with Green Jobs Oshawa, the worker-led movement leading this campaign. We need to build a worker-green alliance grounded in concrete struggles, making the idea of Just Transition, something real. In the upcoming federal election, we need to push politicians and their parties beyond platitudes about climate change and green jobs. Here is a concrete opportunity to really do something about it. This requires placing, to the extent we can, a radical transformation of economic structures and power, led by workers, on the public agenda.

Watch the video here.

Download infographic.

Recorded in Toronto, 30 September 2019.