General Motors Canada says it will use its idled assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont., to manufacture face masks for health-care workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic.
The automaker told Automotive News Canada it is preparing portions of the factory to produce approximately one million masks per month. The production will be based on the model already being used at GM plants in Michigan.
About 140 people currently work on two shifts producing surgical masks and more robust N95 masks at a pace of about 1.5 million masks a month in Michigan, Joe Mizzi, the GM manager who launched and oversees the operation, told Reuters on Friday.
GM Canada says it will have about 50 employees making masks at cost for the federal government. The masks will not be of the N95 variety.
“The project still requires completion of additional work with our governments and our Unifor partners and we will provide updates as we get ready to begin production,” GM Canada said in a statement Friday afternoon.
Unifor President Jerry Dias said in a statement that his members are willing to “make whatever our country needs.”
“The fact that Unifor members will help GM produce as many as a million fabric masks a month, for Health Canada at cost, is an example of what we can do when we work together,” Dias said.
The modern Oshawa assembly plant that produced its last vehicle on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2019, dates back to 1953 and has produced everything from the Chevrolet Bel Air to the Chevrolet Silverado.
The plant has been reduced to a stamping operation, building parts for discontinued models. However, GM Canada says that work had not started yet. However, until the pandemic struck, it had been stamping parts for the CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ont., where the automaker builds the Chevrolet Equinox.
The program gives the plant a lease on life, albeit one that employs just 300 or so people, instead of the 2,600 that had been assembling cars and trucks for years. Each aftermarket part produced there will be built for 10 years, according to GM, giving remaining workers a sense of stability.
(Automotive News Canada)
