Union officials, led by Teamsters president James P. Hoffa, are calling the Detroit River Tunnel Partnership's proposal the "Jobs Tunnel" and say it would help protect as many as 84,000 manufacturing jobs in the Detroit-Windsor region. The partnership proposes to use a 100-year-old two-lane train tunnel that passes under the river to build a new truck tunnel to help ease the bottleneck that now exists for trucks at the Detroit-Windsor, Ontario, border.

"Hundreds of trucks, at this moment, are lined up on the too small, too limited, too outdated Ambassador Bridge," says Teamsters spokesman Bill Black.

The proposal for the tunnel, which would be the first new Canada-Detroit border crossing constructed in more than 50 years, has yet to receive needed governmental approvals on either side of the border. The biggest hurdles to be crossed appear to be on the Canadian side, where the city of Windsor has raised some objections. The tunnel plan calls for a special trucks-only limited access road that would link the tunnel to Highway 401, about 6.4 miles away from the tunnel. On the US side, I-75 is less than a mile away from the tunnel entrance, which is next to the old Michigan Central Train Depot, near the Corktown district of Detroit.