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Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective 'social' bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]