Two years ago, he told his dad over a jug of Michelob beer at the Portly Piper Pub in Oshawa that he simply wasn’t going to accept GM’s decision to close its plant in the city east of Toronto, tossing some 2,500 workers out of work, and closing the books on 100 years of car-making history in the area. His father, an old union hand didn’t doubt him.
Others, however, including most industry insiders and the captains of Canadian automotive enterprise, were taken aback. “Jerry deserves a fair amount of credit,” he said, adding that he knows the union boss to be “straightforward” and “honest” from dealings with him, even when they agree to disagree.Not every measure of the man is equally glowing. One industry insider describes Dias as utterly likable, but “almost Trumpian in his media narcissism.”Article content continued
All the spending and one-upmanship is akin to the space race, only the frontiers are the open roads of this world, and the promise is riches almost beyond measure, rather than national pride, should one company get a sizable jump on the rest in the EV market. Retirement, Dias said, chuckling, is still a few years off. On a recent Friday afternoon, the 62-year-old was sipping on a bottle of water at Unifor’s local chapter in Oshawa. Masked union employees, upon catching sight of their boss, repeatedly thanked him.Dimitry Anastakis, business historian, University of Toronto
Jerry Dias pictured with his parents, Jerry Sr. and Juliet, and his older sisters, Jacqueline, Rosemarie and Donna.In person, Dias dresses the part of the working-class hero: no suit, no tie, no thanks; instead, he wears jeans, a brown leather jacket and practical black shoes. He pulled up outside the Unifor office in a minivan. He had dark circles beneath his eyes, and had packed on a couple of extra pounds around his middle during the negotiating season with automakers.
Unifor now represents workers at hundreds of companies, including Bell Canada, Air Canada, Canadian National Railway Co. and Postmedia Network Canada Corp., where National Post editorial employees in Toronto recently voted in favour of joining the union.Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post Somewhat overlooked in Oshawa’s miraculous rebirth as a car-manufacturing town is that GM doesn’t operate as a non-profit. Whether it was spending a nickel or earmarking $1.3 billion in new investment for its Canadian operations, the Detroit-headquartered company wasn’t going to do anything in Oshawa that it didn’t want to do, unless there was a market rationale for doing it.
scumbag award of the most corrupt union in Canada who abandons victims of PROVEN SYSTEMIC HARASSMENT to the Canadian human rights tribunal for laws that already exist ..he has destroyed so many innocent victims lives a disgrace to unionism
$5 billion grifter. Saw first hand ...first class flights, suites at hotel sask, $1200 cdn goose jackets and big bar tabs. All while the striking union workers couldn’t pay their bills.
the government’s injection of mass amounts of money brought this back ...DIAS is a cancer to the working class ...
Actually he may gain personally but some of the affiliates in the union he heads are sure getting the shaft
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