Remembering Generous Electric

In the middle fifties General Electric built a transformer plant on Woodlawn Road in Guelph. Around the same time, Bucyrus-Erie built a power-shovel plant directly across the street, and a few years later Imperial Tobacco built a factory just across the railroad tracks immediately east of General Electric.

For decades that stretch of Woodlawn Road was the core of Guelph’s industrial zone, which provided thousands of working class jobs that paid well enough that the workers could buy decent homes, take vacations, send their kids to college; the whole nine yards of the middle-class dream.

In the early years the locals nicked-named GE “Generous Electric.” That’s where my mom’s brother Horst signed on when he got off the boat in ’55. A millwright by trade, he had an impeccable pedigree, having completed his apprenticeship in Germany and Switzerland. He was the thin edge of the square-head wedge. First his younger brother and eventually a dozen or so of the next generation, including myself and two of my brothers, followed him through those doors.

Fast forward sixty-five years or so. General Electric is long gone. The doors are still there, but the plant is now occupied by a variety of smaller non-union enterprises, and they’re generally not the sort of operations where the employees expect to ever own their own homes.

General Electric owns part of a joint venture that builds transformers in Mexico today. As far as I know, they never picked up the nick-name “Generous Electric” down there.

The Imperial Tobacco plant closed in 2005, citing the decline in cigarette consumption. They make their cigarettes in Mexico now and ship them back to Canada for the benefit of those Canadians who have failed thus far in kicking the habit.

Across the road, the Bucyrus-Erie plant went through a number of transmutations. It became Euclid, then Terex, and most recently, Hitachi. They still build heavy off-road trucks used globally in mining and other industries. And guess what? They’re still a unionized well-paying heavy-manufacturing plant where the workers can afford to buy their own homes!

I ran into Horst’s son Thomas the other day. Haven’t seen him in years. He got his start at GE but through dint of good timing or good luck ended up at Hitachi. He’s in his sixties now and will actually be able to afford his retirement. He speaks a language that’s all but extinct. How many Canadian workers today have ever heard of “SUB” units? Supplementary Unemployment Benefits. Thomas took a six month lay-off recently and lost not one penny of pay.

The current contract between Hitachi and Unifor runs to 142 pages. Read it and weep.

So how can Hitachi afford to continue paying a living wage while the rest of the street has decamped to Mexico? I believe it’s the Japanese ownership. They’re not beholden to greed-bags who count on the next quarter’s financials for the bonus that’ll allow them to upgrade to a more expensive Porsche.

One of Hitachi’s main competitors, Caterpillar, has a sorry track record of buying up profitable Canadian businesses and then shutting them down and moving manufacturing either off-shore or to “right-to-work-for-less” states. That’s what passes for Yankee ingenuity these days. While Cat was closing the GM Diesel plant forty-five minutes down the 401 a few years ago, Hitachi was spending millions expanding its Guelph facilities.

We obviously need more Japanese investment!