Rust Belt woes spread wide by GM plant closing

updated 6:37 p.m. ET Nov. 21, 2005

SPRING HILL, Tenn. - 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 are also 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 are specifying how many jobs could be lost when the Saturn lon production line shuts down in 2006. 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 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 were finally 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.

Monday’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.

Mark Humphrey / AP Mike O'Rourke, president of United Auto Workers Local 1853, talks Nov. 21 in his office in Spring Hill, Tenn., about the announcement that GM will eliminate 30,000 jobs and close operations at nine North American assembly, stamping and powertrain plants. O'Rourke said that the closure there will affect only the line that has been making the Ion automobile.

Warren Evans, a GM employee at the 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.

“We’re shocked,” said Chris Sherwood, president of United Auto Workers Local 652, which represents about 1,000 workers at a GM metal center in Ingham County’s Lansing Township. “We thought we had a pass on this round. But we didn’t.”

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