About 100 people stormed a ballroom in downtown Windsor, Ont., on Tuesday morning to protest an auction of plant equipment belonging to their former employer, U.S.-based Catalina Precision Products, Ltd. (Sean Henry/CBC)

Former employees of an automotive parts plant in Windsor, Ont. continue to blockade their old workplace in hopes of preventing potential buyers of the plant's equipment from collecting their lots.

Six ex-workers are keeping watch at the Aradco plant on Charles Street, either standing guard or sitting in their trucks.

"We already stopped, like, three or four potential buyers," Jaime Hernandez told CBC News early Tuesday afternoon.

"It's very important for us to give the message to the buyers that they're going to have a hard time to get the equipment out of here because they haven't paid the workers what they owe to the workers," said Hernandez, who worked at Aradco for 16 years.

The equipment was to have been sold at an auction Tuesday morning, but organizers canceled it after 100 former employees and their supporters stormed the downtown hotel where it was being held.

The workers say their former employer, U.S.-based Catalina Precision Products, shouldn't be able to sell its old equipment without first paying what they say is $2.4 million of severance and vacation pay.

Catalina laid off its 80 workers in March, closing its plants without warning when its primary buyer, Chrysler, cancelled its contract after a dispute. The plants produced clamps and fasteners for Chrysler minivans.

Eight months later, the workers are still furious.

On Monday, they blocked entrances to the Aradco plant and the Aramco plant on Walker Road, where potential bidders had been invited to view the equipment for sale.

At about 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, approximately 100 ex-workers and their supporters entered the lobby of the Radisson Hotel to disrupt the auction. They shouted at and jostled with Windsor police officers and hotel staff who tried to block them from elevators, before they managed to reach the second floor ballroom where the auction was being held.

Gerry Farnham, left, president of CAW Local 195, which represents the former Catalina workers, jostles with a hotel employee blocking him from taking a hotel elevator to the auction. (Sean Henry/CBC)

Once inside, they sat in chairs saved for auction bidders, cheering as Gerry Farnham, the president of the Canadian Auto Workers Local 195, took the floor to call the auction "an absolute atrocity."

"Do you think this money's coming back to our workers?" Farnham yelled.

"No!" the workers shouted, clapping and whistling.

"Absolutely not!" Farnham agreed. "We're not stupid, and it's naive to be thinking anything different!"

Farnham and his former colleagues consider the remaining equipment their only hope in claiming money they say is rightfully theirs.

But "the equipment does have to be sold," according to Todd Duarte, who works with the auction house. "It just can't sit idle here forever."

Chrysler has already removed its equipment from the plants.

The auction organizers, Michigan-based William and Lipton, have said they will hold the auction online at a later date instead.