Posted on 08/13/2005 11:19:39 AM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
INDIANAPOLIS - DaimlerChrysler AG will close its Indianapolis foundry and eliminate 881 jobs by Sept. 30, reducing the automaker's once formidable Indiana manufacturing presence to just the city of Kokomo.
DaimlerChrysler recently notified the Indiana Department of Workforce Development of the closure under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act. The law requires employers to give 60 days notice before certain plant closings and layoffs. The loss of 881 jobs is the largest in Indiana under WARN this year.
A provision in the four-year labor agreement struck by the automaker and the United Auto Workers in 2003 called for the foundry to close by the end of the third quarter of 2005, company spokeswoman Curtrise Garner said Friday.
"The company and union jointly agreed to that," she said by telephone from DaimlerChrysler's U.S. headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich.
News reports at the time of the labor agreement said DaimlerChrysler would phase out the foundry over four years. The plant along Interstate 70 west of downtown Indianapolis produces V-6 and V-8 engine blocks.
UAW Local 550 represents workers at the foundry. Local President James Clark had little to say about the closure when asked for comment Friday. The affected workers, most of whom now live in Indianapolis, have been offered jobs at a variety of other DaimlerChrysler plants, he said.
Workers who choose to transfer to another DaimlerChrysler plant instead of retiring receive 95 percent of their base pay after taxes until a new job is found for them, Garner said.
Department of Workforce Development agency officials will meet with DaimlerChrysler representatives next Thursday to discuss state job assistance to the affected workers, agency spokesman Kip Chase said.
The plant was owned by American Foundry Co. until Chrysler bought it in 1946. The automaker invested in major upgrades there in 1964, 1978, 1988, and the late 1990s.
The closing will diminish DaimlerChrysler's presence in Indiana to Kokomo, where three transmission plants and an aluminum casting plant employ about 7,500 workers. The automaker spun off its 1,400-worker New Castle machine shop to a joint venture three year ago, ending a 96-year history in the eastern Indiana city where the high school still bears the Chrysler name.
The notice to the state of 881 jobs being lost topped Indiana's largest previous WARN job loss this year, for 613 jobs eliminated with the June closure of Tower Automotive's auto frame assembly plant in Corydon.
I have a sense of the absurd. You wouldn't blame a plastics company in china for the price of a subway sandwich in America
by any normal leap unless you knew the larger picture of how they play into the issue.. just wouldn't seem normal. Walmart
imports the vast majority of it's product from china - a market with which one cannot compete on a cost level and win unless your cost level is lower than theirs. Basic, simple economics. The fact that a walmart uses that method of competing local players out of their own market causes ripples in economics that aren't apparent on their surface or immediately unless you understand that offshoring and outsourcing begets the same. You also have to see that a company the size of Walmart sets precident and by competition forces competitors to do the same thing to try to stay in business themselves. And Car companies buy product from companies that normally are not considered "automotive manufacturers." Thus, Walmart could affect the issue by precident, by example, by force of competition that causes a supplier of the automaker to lose standing or close, etc.
The problem of your "absurd" example is that it isn't "absurd". Walmart dictates price to its suppliers. And if walmart doesn't like the price of a supplier, they can kill the supplier as with Rubbermaid. If Rubbermaid supplies another manufacturer, then ripples flow through the market.
Simple cause and effect. And alot of vendors that sell to walmart also deal with vendors that sell product and raw materials to auto manufacturers, aircraft manufacturers, etc. There are too many ways Walmart's vast influence could play into this closing. You dismiss it as impossible. I didn't say they had anything to do with it directly. I merely offer that their actions could as easily be in part responsible just as HP and IBM outsourcing forced other computer support, manufacturers and suppliers to outsource causing a larger footprint of impact across the marketplace than one might suspect immediately. If you have a small plastics company in Kokomo, Indiana that supplies planter pots to Walmart and computer case faceplates to a computer company, what happens to the computer company when Walmart puts that plastics company out of business? That's absurd, right. Afterall, what affect could a plastics company have on a computer manufacturer... How much cloth is in the interior of a car and who makes it? How much plastic? How much silica? How many computer components? How much wire?
How much carpet and who supplies that? ...
As afore mentioned, if walmart subverts the market and gets by with it, why shouldn't the auto maker.. I don't dismiss the possible impact. I also don't look at your lack of attentiveness to such fine points as some grand conspiracy and lack of sophistication.. maybe lack of common sense and or experience; but, nobody's perfect. On the other hand, I guess things you hadn't considered might make you look at an opponent as whacked till you start thinking. Or you may just use such a charge as a rhetorical device in absence of any substantive or qualitatively useful argument. Things that make you go "hmmmm".
has anyone ever gotten a job from federal retraining programs?
after 9-11 i had like a $3000 voucher to go take classes for "retraining" ,all the institutions were interested in was the getting their hands on the voucher.
I ended up not using it and making 60k per year
You are in Iraq, I understand?
I disagree with Willie Green's economic point of view; however I respect him as a FReeper and thought that FReeper MikeinIraq's posting of cartoons bordered on childish behavior.
Yep, he's the stinkin' socialist SOB who authored the first Federal Income Tax back in 1913.
Every American taxpayer should curse his name on April 15.
well my point was indeed free traders were in power in 1941
I also am interested in the notion of trade as a weapon. We can use the threat of tariffs as effectively as we can the threat of military reprisal to achieve much of the same objectives.
I am flattered that a FR celebrity would respond to my post personally....kinda like meeting tom cruise
There was a federal income tax during the Civil War for a short time.
Hasn't worked much in Cuba and the democrats have failed with sanctions more often than not. Now what?
Yes, and one is the natural byproduct of the other. When the government could no longer fund itself on tariffs - because tariffs were eliminated* - they had to take money from the American people in the form of income taxes. Bastards.
* of course, if the federal government were smaller to begin with, it would be even less of an issue...
""I also am interested in the notion of trade as a weapon. We can use the threat of tariffs as effectively as we can the threat of military reprisal to achieve much of the same objectives.""
trade can indeed be used as a weapon , though I doubt youd capture anything stategic with a tariff.
BTW tariffs are much more preferable than quotas, which only end up giving the exporting nation a defacto cartel.
No, but you can make it easier. One of the reasons Saddam was unable to offer much resistance was because of the trade sanctions. If he had had the ability to buy his military hardware on the open market, resistance would have been much more.
When was the last time Cuba was significant economically? They are broke, starving, falling apart and a laughingstock. Now, they ARE communist, but so is Red China, and look how much THEY (the Chinese) have benefitted from "free trade" at our expense.
iam not so certain, we would have blocked any trade with iraq.
i think yuoll find that over the past 50 years the wage gap between the US and the rest of the world has narrowed not gotten larger.
Also low wages alone do not explain movement of jobs, if they did Africa would have all the jobs
...one of the reasons of which was to keep him (Saddam) down economically...
The "serious education" was meant to be fascitious (sp?).
Oh, and people take me too seriously. Like yourself.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.