GM plant closings wrench company towns

SPRING HILL, Tenn. (AP) — When General Motors Corp. started building cars in this sleepy farming town nearly 15 years ago, the Saturn plant was touted as a key component of the automaker’s vision for the future.

But now this thriving Nashville suburb finds itself recast as another in a long list of Rust Belt survivors — worried about its economic future as GM announces it will eliminate 30,000 manufacturing jobs, including a production line in Spring Hill where the Ion compact car is produced. Other communities in Oklahoma, Georgia, Michigan and Canada also are facing a future without GM jobs.

“You hate to see jobs go,” Spring Hill Mayor Danny Leverette said. “That’s where my heart is — first and foremost with the employees. GM is in some tough times now, but I remain an optimist.”

Neither union nor GM officials is specifying how many jobs could be lost when the Saturn lon production line shuts down next year. But any layoffs would be the first at Spring Hill, which GM thrust into the spotlight 20 years ago when it announced it was creating a new kind of car division that could better compete with low-cost imports from Toyota, Honda and Nissan.

The plant, where a separate line will remain open for the assembly of Vue sport utility vehicles (SUVs), employs about 5,700 and is one of the state’s largest employers.

Saturn once billed itself as “a different kind of company” making “a different kind of car,” but after a promising start, Saturn let the car’s look and technology get stale. New models finally were introduced, but to mixed results. The Ion production line was shut down for at least 15 weeks in 2004 as sales failed to meet the company’s expectations.

Yesterday’s news about plant closings left employees stunned at GM’s Oklahoma City assembly plant, where the midsize Chevrolet Trailblazer and GMC Envoy SUVs are produced. Two thousand hourly and 200 salaried employees will be out of work by 2006.

Warren Evans, an employee at GM’s Oklahoma City plant since 1983, said he and many workers at the plant were skeptical of GM’s decision to retool the plant several years ago.

“When they put this new product in there, the SUV, I knew it wasn’t going to work out,” he said. “The market was already flooded with the SUVs.

“The engineers, to me, they’re stuck on stupid. They never talk to us, the people on the line.”

At other GM sites where cuts were announced, employees knew reductions were in the works but faulted the company for short notice of the decisions.

Some union leaders in the Lansing, Mich., area — where GM has been a dominant presence for years and about 1,400 jobs are expected to be lost — said they received just 10 minutes’ notice that one of their parts factories was targeted for closure next year.

The Michigan losses include 400 at GM’s Lansing Craft Centre, where workers build the slow-selling Chevrolet SSR two-seater truck. That plant is slated to close in mid-2006, followed by a parts-processing operation in Ypsilanti in 2007 and an engine facility in Flint that makes the 3800-series engine in 2008.

The Lansing area now has an estimated 6,500 GM jobs, about a third as many as during employment peaks in the 1970s and 1980s. But GM is building up a parts and vehicle assembly operation in nearby Delta Township.

The automaker also opened a Cadillac assembly factory near downtown Lansing in recent years.

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