2,582 will leave Ohio GM plants
Most of them will leave by July 1.
STAFF/WIRE REPORTS
About 13 percent of the 20,000 hourly workers employed at General Motors Corp. plants in Ohio have elected to take buyouts or retire early as part of the company’s plan to cut costs, the automaker said Thursday.
GM said 2,582 Ohio workers have opted to leave the payroll, most by July 1. A total of 19,742 workers are employed at the nine GM plants and facilities in Ohio.
The biggest blocks of Ohio workers who elected to leave are coming primarily from GM’s larger plants in Ohio: Moraine (778), Toledo (440), Lordstown Assembly (378), Parma (350) and Mansfield (278). Union officials said about 175 workers at the fabricating plant in Lordstown accepted buyouts.
GM is adding 1,400 workers to the Lordstown complex to replace the workers taking buyouts and to add a third shift to increase production. Many of the new workers are transfers from other GM plants.
Nationwide, GM said 18,657 of approximately 70,000 hourly workers accepted buyout and early retirement offers.
The departures will help GM as it closes four pickup truck and sport utility vehicle plants, including its mid-sized SUV plant in Moraine, a Dayton suburb, because of surging gas prices.
Tracy Merritt, 47, of Dayton, is taking a $140,000 buyout after working nearly 18 years at GM’s plant in Moraine. His last day is Friday.
Merritt, who lined up a job as an electrician with the federal government, said even before GM announced earlier this month that it will close the plant by or before 2010 he worried that it would be shut down because of changes in the auto industry.
David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, said the exodus of workers will reduce GM’s labor costs and should make the automaker more competitive relatively quickly.
“They want to replace some of the higher-priced workers with lower-price workers,” Cole said. “And they want to skinny down the whole population.”
GM expects to replace some workers at a new entry level wage of about $14 per hour, about half the rate of current production workers.
“It erodes the skill base,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in labor issues. “The workers who leave are very highly paid, but they are also highly skilled.”
GM now has to figure out how many workers from closed plants and other areas of the company will take positions vacated by those who are leaving.
“We’re sorting through a significant amount of change,” GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said.
He would not give figures on exactly how many workers will be replaced. He said GM already is hiring at the lower-tier wage.
GM also must hire workers who want to come back to the company from Delphi Corp., its former parts-making operation, and from banks of laid-off workers still being paid.