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KITCHENER, Ont. — Tough new measures would be implemented to help and protect workers facing layoffs in Ontario if voters choose a New Democrat government on Oct. 10, party leader Howard Hampton said Friday.
Speaking across the road from the now-closed BF Goodrich plant in Kitchener, Hampton accused Premier Dalton McGuinty of acting in the interests of global corporations instead of Ontario communities and workers.
“We shouldn't be known as one of the jurisdictions where it's quickest, easiest and cheapest to lay off workers,” Hampton said, noting BF Goodrich is a profitable company that has other plants operating in Quebec, the United States and Mexico.
“In Dalton McGuinty's Ontario, it is just too easy to close a plant or a mill.”
Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton arrives at a campaign stop in Toronto earlier in the week. (CP/Frank Gunn)
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Hampton proposed longer layoff notice periods and mandatory job adjustment committees for mass layoffs of 50 or more jobs, and one-year of notice from companies to allow time for the province to intervene and help negotiate a closure agreement.
“In almost every case, companies know well in advance when they might be making decisions like that,” Hampton argued. “The one-year notice allows workers, communities and governments to come together to look at alternatives.”
He is also pledging to double severance packages to two weeks' pay for every year worked and to remove the 26-week severance cap.
“These provisions exist in many other jurisdictions,” Hampton said.
Later, Hampton received a warm welcome from supporters at a tavern in Port Colborne, flanked by local NDP member Peter Kormos.
Hampton pledged to ensure laid-off workers get back pay and pension and vacation benefits. He also promised to boost the monthly pension guarantee to $2,500 a month and create a wage protection fund. A similar $25-million fund once existed but was scrapped.
“Workers who've worked for 20 years and paid into a pension fund all their work lives should not be left high and dry through no fault of their own,” Hampton said.
He continued to attack McGuinty for not doing anything to save manufacturing jobs.
“When you see the premier of Newfoundland going to global corporations and saying to them, ‘I'm here to fight for workers and working families in Newfoundland,' I say, where's Dalton McGuinty been?”
However, McGuinty insisted his government hasn't been sitting idle, and has done a number of things to help impacted workers.
“One is that we send in the equivalent of a SWAT team as soon as we find out about the loss of jobs, into the community, to work with individuals and to provide them with training and retraining opportunities,” he said.
Earlier Friday, Hampton met with workers in Kitchener, a region that has lost 6,900 manufacturing jobs in recent years. In the Niagara region, 4,400 jobs have disappeared since 2002.
A Kitchener-area plant owned by cash-register company NCR Canada Ltd. is slated to close in early November, putting 450 more people out of work.
Many of the affected workers have been forced to take lower-paying jobs with temp agencies, said Kitchener Centre NDP candidate Rick Moffatt.
The Liberals, however, claim they've created 350,000 net new jobs since taking office, with the unemployment rate falling from 7.0 to 6.4 per cent. They point out that under the NDP government in the early 1990s, 100,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, 14 mills closed and unemployment was at 10 per cent. They also say Hampton's plan to raise corporate taxes will kill jobs.
One affected NCR worker, Jim Mills, 44, said there's a need for mandatory job adjustment centres.
“We were expecting a local agency to set up an action centre for us like BF Goodrich,” he said. “But instead we got a temp agency to teach us how to write resumes.”
Ontario Federation of Labour president Wayne Samuelson, a former employee at the BF Goodrich plant, said he's irate over what he calls the “arrogance” shown by McGuinty for people thrown out of work.
“That insulting suggestion that somehow all of these people are getting jobs at $19.50 an hour is ridiculous,” Samuelson said. “We should fight like hell to make it different.”
Samuelson said of the 1,000 workers affected by the BF Goodrich closure last year, only 300 have found full-time work.
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