Excerpts from and link to WSJ article.
“Caterpillar’s decision, ending a standoff with locked-out workers huddled around barrels of burning scrap wood outside the London factory gates, may benefit another downtrodden manufacturing city: Muncie, Ind., where Caterpillar last year opened a locomotive plant and where it is trying to fill jobs at about half the pay workers in Ontario received. At a job fair in Muncie Saturday, Caterpillar will be offering jobs at that plant at wages ranging from $12 to $18.50 per hour.”
“The gulf between the company and the union was too wide to resolve.”
“The Canadian Auto Workers union, which represents the workers, called the move “truly rotten behavior. They are immoral, they are unethical and they are greedy,” said union president Ken Lewenza in an interview.”
“Mr. Julian, the county economic-development official, said site-selection experts for manufacturing plants have told him that about 30% of such projects specify that the factories go to states with right-to-work laws. “We obviously want to compete for those,” he said. Indiana this week became the 23rd state with such a law and the first to enact one since Oklahoma did a decade ago.”
“Muncie lost thousands of jobs over the past decade as the U.S. auto industry shuttered plants making vehicle parts. In 2009, BorgWarner Inc. closed a local auto-transmission plant after the United Auto Workers local refused to renegotiate a contract two years ahead of its expiration. That plant remains idle.”
The RTW legislation is already paying off for Indiana.
I think with a little more research you would find that this plant in Canada isn’t new but is the old EMD (Electro-Motive Division) plant that was owned by General Motors for years and years before being sold to Cat.
The plant has a very long history of building locomotives for use in North America and for export.
A little history…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-Motive_Diesel
JMHO
Thank you for adding valuable information to the topic. It is good to see Indiana attract these jobs from another country.
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