“The vans keep coming…like bullets…” said one woman working in Bodyshop and it was just like that. The jobs at the Van Plant were tough, brutally so, heavy, precise and the pace unrelenting The line didn't care how tired you were, whether your marriage was breaking down, or your spouse dying. The line moved and you moved with it. The bolts needed to be tightened, the parts moved into place, welded, painted and shipped without defect. It was hellish in the summer, an old plant, a metal box with no air conditioning and few windows, the air moved sluggishly about with fans. It would be 40c some days and the machinery would break down from the heat, sometimes for hours. Even a minute of downtime was treasured, talked about, relived.

In this unlikely environment, the employees of the plant developed deep bonds, providing support in many ways, practical, emotional and financial. When someone in the plant was in need, the community was there. Someone would help with the job, listen to stories of troubles at home, or take up collections for those in dire need due to illness or other family tragedy. The community provided the necessary support. Race, culture, language were not the defining factors. If a need was known, it was dressed. It would have been hard to merely survive the work without this support. With it, we throve.

On the days that were especially hot, the supervisors would bring popsicles around and distribute them on the line to refresh and help us cool down. Sometimes, on those hot, hot days, if the line was down for long enough, the mood would get giddy…people would jump onto parts carts and their buddies would push them around…or the fire extinguishers would be put to use in a totally improper, but highly amusing water fight…and the cups would come out filled with water as people would chase each other through the lines trying to douse each other. A particularly sneaky coworker might creep up behind you and slide some ice down the back of your coveralls as everyone laughed at your yelp of surprise.

The plant population was a bro cross section of humanity, representing every continent and dozens of cultures. Many were second and third generation employees that h grown up together having attended the same schools or met as children through the annual union picnics. Others came from around the globe and were brought together purely through the vehicle of work, labouring together so closely that their jobs often required constant physical contact. Sometimes, this would mean bracing your back against your coworker while fastening a part into place. One such job was Rear Door Install in Respot 3, where Haissam Ramam and Frank Tridico worked side by side and back to back.

Families by blood were everywhere, the Button’s, Putric’s, Hillier’s, Chung’s and Mallia’s and many others. The various summer students with parents working in the plant injected another dimension, they generally got easier jobs, which would cause some friction, but it was recognized that having them there me it easier, even possible, for co-workers to send their children to school.

One year, a girl whose father worked in the plant and was in to work for the summer was attacked on her way home, beaten and left for de. Her injuries were quite severe and she was unable to return to work for the rest of the summer. A collection was taken to replace the money she would have earned and over $10,000 was raised.

Nothing is perfect and every family fights about something, but for the most part, people got along, despite cultural differences and regardless of race. I used to call it “Liberalism’s Poster Child.” In the centre of all of this was a powerful union with a highly skilled and motivated leership and an involved membership that h, almost paroxically, a congenial relationship with management. This congeniality was a feature generally throughout the plant with workers and supervisors sometimes taking coffee or spending line breakdowns together in the department office. The same group might well sit together the next day in a grievance meeting. Conflicts tended to be seen as a business issue.

If I have one regret about the project, it is that I was afraid to photograph in the office and lose my very unique access.

Greenspace was important, there were several gardens around the perimeter of the plant, most very small, but each h its faithful visitors. Truly spectacular was the Paintshop garden, on the roof of the plant; a genuine oasis, complete with birds and small wildlife that arrived with the soil (one time, a gopher came in). In the garden, you were surrounded by plants, some as high as a tall mans he, obscuring the view of the stacks and filtering the air. People would trek across the plant walking 10 minutes to the garden (and 10 back) just to have 10 minutes to sit there.

The garden was initiated by Greg MacDonald, a General Supervisor in the Paint Shop, in an agreement with Local 303. Jimmy Shaw, who worked in maintenance, was given the responsibility of tending it in the first years and was followed on his retirement by Barry Mitchell, an electrical tresman. Barry likes to tell a story of a visiting management expert who was originally from Texas; On seeing the garden for the first time, he burst out with “I been everywhere in the chain and ain’t never seen NO shit like THIS shit nowhere!” It was wild and lovely, there was probably nothing like it in any other major assembly plant anywhere.

The garden was me to provide a soothing experience…to lift us up from the noise and chaos of the line. It did that beautifully, taking visitors to it utterly away from their jobs and worries.

On May 6, 1993, the doors were closed. On March 15, 1995, the last of the walls were knocked down. The corporate flag was removed when the demolition began. The Canian flag was left to rot to tatters until I phoned the city to point it out, and it was also laid to rest.

The GM Scarborough Van Plant Extended Family web project would include all forms of media, writing, photography, video, and audio). It would explore the full potential of the newest web technologies in creating a 'Webumentary' form. The website would ultimately house all of the usable Extended Family photographs, as well as all the video interviews and their transcripts, in a database driven archive. The photos would shown on a page that would accommodate a story about the photograph or the people in it, as well as comments by others users.

The site would have three types of users, ministrator/authours, Van Plant Alumni (and their families), and the general public, (reers, etc.). Each group would have different privileges, authours would be able to create new sections and alter structures, as well as d content (like writing stories for the photographs), and tag it, and also d comments to existing posts. Van Plant Alumni would be able to d content and tag it, as well as existing posts and be able to comment on all posts, the general public would be able to access the site, comment on posts, and downlo (for a nominal fee) information and assets from the site for their own projects.

The intention is to immortalize the Scarborough Van Plant and it's community, and to be an archive of information about a late 20th Century car plant, at the end of the first high period of union culture and power.