Nearly 48,000 take buyout offers

At the GM Lordstown Assembly Plant, more than 1,000 workers have taken the offer.
STAFF/WIRE REPORTS
DETROIT -- About 47,600 hourly workers have decided to leave General Motors Corp. and Delphi Corp. through buyout or early retirement offers, accelerating the distressed companies' plans to cut costs by paring their work forces.
At GM, where about 35,000 people will depart -- including about 1,600 hourly workers at the GM Lordstown complex -- Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner said he was surprised by the numbers. But he said the number of takers will allow the Detroit company to reach its target reduction of 30,000 manufacturing jobs by Jan. 1, two years ahead of schedule.
Hundreds of workers at GM Lordstown will leave the company Friday with a buyout, while others will go later in the year.
Sign-up deadline for the buyouts, which range from $35,000 to $140,000, was last Friday, and workers have until this Friday to change their minds.
Staggered departures
At the complex's fabricating plant, 180 workers are scheduled to leave or retire at the end of this week, said Jim Kaster, president of United Auto Workers Local 1714.
The rest will leave at various times throughout the rest of this year. About 500 of the local's 1,500 members have signed up for the buyouts.
At the assembly plant, 1,090 of the 3,800 hourly workers have registered, said Jim Graham, president of UAW Local 1112.
Graham said some will begin leaving this Friday, but he will know more later this week.
He said union officials are trying to accommodate the requests of workers with at least 30 years of service, but management is controlling the departure dates so they do not disrupt production.
The buyouts come as the Lordstown plant eliminates its midnight shift July 17. That shift has about 1,600 workers -- which also is the number of workers taking buyouts -- so union officials expect few workers to be idled by the change.
Workers who aren't needed when the shift is eliminated would be placed in a jobs bank, where they are paid even though there is no production work.
GM previously announced plans to cut its 113,000-person U.S. hourly work force by 30,000 and to close a dozen plants by 2008.
"Over the past several months, we have accomplished a great deal in our strategy to reshape GM into a company that is more nimble, more global and built for long-term success," Wagoner said Monday.
Delphi incentives
Friday also was the deadline for workers at Delphi, GM's former parts operation that is now a separate company, to file for early retirement incentives.
Delphi said Monday that about 12,600 employees represented by the United Auto Workers union took early retirement offers at the Troy-based automotive parts supplier, which filed for bankruptcy protection last October. Some Delphi workers also have an additional buyout offer on the table.
In the Mahoning Valley, some 3,800 Delphi Packard Electric workers are represented by the International Union of Electrical Workers. The Packard workers will have 45 days to sign up for the buyouts once the company introduces the program in the plant.
Based on preliminary numbers from GM, about 4,600 employees accepted buyouts and about 30,400 chose to retire. It is expected that most will retire or leave the company by the end of the year, GM said. Delphi did not break out how many workers took each option.
Foresees $5 billion in savings
The nation's No. 1 automaker said it expects to save $5 billion in structural costs in 2006, with a substantial portion coming from the buyouts and retirements.
Wagoner said the exodus will allow GM to dramatically reduce the number of workers in the "jobs bank," where laid-off workers get most of their pay and benefits even when they're not working.
"That's an important part of what we're doing here," he said.
Because so many people are leaving, both GM and Delphi will have to scramble to keep plants and assembly lines running by recalling laid-off workers, bringing in transfers from other plants and hiring new people.
"There will be this challenge to make sure there are enough workers in certain locations. You can't just move people around like chess pieces," said Greg Gardner, spokesman for Harbour Consulting, a Troy company that tracks manufacturing productivity.
Quality issue
GM officials said they will maintain quality at the plants, mainly because they've already had plenty of practice at such transitions.
Officials said about 9,000 people already have left the company under the attrition offers.
"We've managed through that quite well," Wagoner said, adding that the remaining workers who took the packages have departure dates that are scattered through the end of the year.
"We feel highly comfortable we can offer continued focus on great quality," he said.
But Gerald Meyers, former chairman of American Motors Corp. who now teaches at the University of Michigan, said the cuts initially will cause problems but eventually will be positive for both companies.
"It's a manufacturing manager's nightmare with all these people moving in and out," said Meyers, who predicted quality problems for Delphi and to a lesser degree, for GM, as the transition is made to a smaller work force.
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