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.
Well with gas prices skyrocketing, maybe they're gonna replace the V-6's and -8's with something from Briggs & Stratton.
Foundry operation is a skill acquired by doing. This is not the kind of thing the country should allow to disappear since the foundry industry is far from dead worldwide. If international commerce gets interrupted by war, this is one of the things that will make victory more difficult and expensive.
Willie, Don't expect any such postings. You walk the talk. Others just change the topic to you.
Willie, stay with the program. These Bush worshippers who attack you are living in a fantasy land where all the new new hotel and retail jobs affirm their faith in that corporate bobble-head puppet. There are lots of us out here (with serious educations) who live in the real world and read your posts with interest.
Nah, it's the fault of mindless selfish simps who have no loyalty to their fellow countrymen and wander about decrying people who speak against "the party". Everyone knows you don't dispute what comes 'von dem beareau von der Fuhrer.'
And anyone that doesn't blindly follow the Czar must be insane. So, it must be Walmart's fault, must it not. Because that musing paints the broader stroke - it must be an insane conspiracy because everyone knows the Fuhrer and the party cannot be wrong.. god forbid. Your mind would snap if you had to consider you might be wrong. Such is the predicament of the cultist. Go drink your koolaid and ponder a budhist concept - specifically, the one that says if the sound of your voice is not an improvement over silence, shut up.
By the way, my academic work so far has involved the industrial run-up to WWII, and WG's warnings should be heeded.
Also, you idiots don't realize that every time a decently-paid American is run off a job, another Hillary voter is created.
And don't blame it on the unions/Democrats/Clinton/MSM/blah blah blah. Most industrial jobs, including those involved in making automobile spare parts, are tranferrring to the COMMUNISTS in China, by the suits who just love uncritical people like yourselves.
Bush improved my life tremendously with his new policy. I went from a salaried "good job" to working two part time jobs with no benefits making less than half my salary and have no time and can barely pay my bills. Bush is a failure. When I know Democrats are failures at economics and I also know I did better under democrat policies, this president is nothing if not a failure. Thank God for term limits and the constitution. All these rats posing as conservatives will pay the piper eventually. And that's the one comfort I have in the mess these jackasses have made of the lives of millions of americans.
Willie, please regale us with some of the stories of new businesses starting up and taking off like gangbusters. Or the laid off employees who have created their own employment and don't have to depend on the largesse of others.
I know, the media doesn't cover that stuff, so the stories are hard to find.
I'm sorry for your loss, but blaming W for it all is as faulty as chering him uncritically, as do all these bot Freepers. No important policies would be changed if a Democrat was in the White House, since the same suits would be in charge. The problem is in the system, not the individuals chosen to serve as figureheads in highly-staged television appearances.
chering = cheering
I need to eat lunch.
Congrats, Willie. I know it makes your day to find a factory or some business close. Course, in southern Dayton, they are building everywhere: new homes, new Walgreens, two new Paneras, new Hobby Lobby. Homarama just had its open house with six $1.2 million model homes (and a dozen or so being built behind them). One was sold to the guy who created "Mr. Prescription" home delivery of drugs. Course, I guess he doesn't count to you, because even though he employs hundreds and makes lots of stockholders lots of money, he isn't actually PRODUCING the drugs.
Read his posting history, almost all his posts blame the government for not providing him a decent job.
You mean the "one in a million" stories that are akin to fairy tales. Fairytales are great for putting children to sleep who still believe in "if". As a grownup, we reach a point where we realize that there are the one in a million stories (people who start businesses from nothing by being in the right place, knowing the right people or having some other advantage). We also realize there is the average story for the vast majority of people who don't have the option, money, connections, etc.
Fairytales can motivate; but, they largely don't come true. As such, they are pacifiers for those who would rather not deal with reality. And the reality is the guys like me who had the American dream rug yanked out from under us by politicos with their own agendas. Us average guys ended up with no employment, insufficient employment, or multiple low paying jobs with no benefits and no real future. If the average story makes your guy look bad, the dishonest approach is to sell the fairytale in hopes that someone will believe that's the average. Is this what you expect us to do? Sell people the fairytale of what a few managed after a severe kick in the teeth and present it as the average case that we should all become Geobbles for the sake of the party? Or do we just deal with the truth and let the party defend itself?
'employs hundreds of people' Who wooda thunk that somebody would create jobs out of what drug stores used to do for nothing. What will they think of next, pizza, milk, bread, cleaners, groceries, wow. Everything old is new again.
Ane you, sir, are a liar. I've never stated that the government owed me a decent job, much less blamed them for not providing it. And, yes, I welcome anyone to review what I "have" said as opposed to the lie you present. Has it occurred to you that people you may hope to sway may not listen to you when they find that you are an outright liar?
Or are you just invoking club lingo to let the others in your pack know it's time to shut up someone who can speak forcefully...
Hah --- You missed the Wall St. Journal today
Keep looking for bad news Willy, its getting harder to find.
#######################################################################################################################################################################3
The Great American Jobs Machine
Employment is higher than at any time in history.
Saturday, August 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
We would like to take a moment to pause and marvel at the U.S. economy. Last week's Labor Department report of more than 200,000 new jobs in July, and two million over the past year, provides the latest bullish details. But the larger story of American job creation, and its causes, is even more impressive.
First, more Americans have jobs today than at any other time in history. Second, over the past two decades or so, the U.S. has created more than 40 million jobs--twice as many as Europe and Japan combined. And third, the U.S. has one of the lowest jobless rates of all developed nations.
It was only a year ago that John Kerry was blasting the "jobless recovery." Lou Dobbs was flogging "outsourcing" every night on CNN as a sign of peril for the American workforce. That criticism now looks wildly off base. The 5% jobless rate today is almost a percentage point below what it was during the same stage of the business cycle during the vaunted "Clinton expansion."
In the past 24 months 3.5 million more Americans have found work, which is the equivalent of a new job for every worker in the entire state of Indiana. Every single job that was lost during the bursting of the technology bubble and stock market collapse of 2000-01 has been matched by a new job, often in a new industry. As the nearby chart shows, the bottom of the jobs recession hit in mid-2003--and the recovery began at the very point that the Bush marginal-rate tax cuts were enacted into law.
But just when it seemed there was reason to celebrate, a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston warns that the low U.S. unemployment rate is a "false signal" of prosperity. Why? Because American workers are allegedly becoming discouraged in their quest to find work, and this surge in dropout workers brings the real jobless rate to between 6% and 8%. The evidence for a surge in discouraged workers is that the percentage of working age Americans in the labor force has fallen from an all-time high of 67.3% to 66.0% today. If this seems worrisome, it isn't. The average labor force participation rate for the post-World War II period is 63%--well below today's rate.
Labor economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute has thoroughly refuted the Boston Fed study. She finds that "most non-participants are out of the labor force by choice--in school, parenting their children, or retired early." Since one's future wages and employment opportunities are highly correlated with years of education, this trend toward kids staying in school longer augurs well, not poorly, for the next generation of workers.
Ms. Furchtgott-Roth also discovered that the decline in labor force participation for women is mostly a reflection of good economic times and rising incomes. With median family income now above $52,000 a year, more families can maintain a comfortable lifestyle with one spouse working rather than two. Ironically, for years critics of the U.S. economy have complained that Americans are "overworked" and that "it now takes two incomes to produce the living standard that once required just a working father." To the U.S. bashers, it is a sign of decline if more people are working, and it is just as bad if fewer people are working.
Workers do get discouraged from finding a job when they are unemployed for a long stretch of time. But the percentage of "long-term unemployed" workers is about two percentage points lower than it was in the same stage of the Clinton expansion. In Japan and France the share of long-term unemployed workers is three times higher than in the U.S. Germany's rate is four times higher. If America's unemployed are "discouraged," French and German workers must be feeling absolutely suicidal.
None of this is meant to ignore the reality that the rapidly evolving American economy has created turmoil for many workers. In particular, older Americans in declining blue collar occupations are feeling the sting of global competition. We are undeniably losing some manufacturing jobs over time (although manufacturing output has risen as a result of new technology and productivity gains).
But those positions are being rapidly replaced with information, technology and service jobs--most of which pay more than factory work and are less physically grueling. For a quarter century the U.S. has demonstrated an unrivaled capacity to transition into the information age with record numbers of jobs gained, not lost. And we have done so while absorbing millions of baby boomers, women, and immigrants into our workforce with no increase in unemployment.
Part of the explanation for this success is that, especially compared to Europe, the U.S. has imposed fewer taxes and regulations (even though we have plenty) that make it onerous for employers to hire and fire workers. A unique feature of the U.S. economy is that Americans move in and out of jobs--usually to rise up the income elevator--at a rapid and persistent pace. This is the key to the Great American Jobs Machine, and it explains why Europe and Japan should be more like us, and not the other way around.
I hav no clue what you are prattling about.........my comment was sarcasm..........
Negativity is a label. I can think positively or negatively and neither will get me anywhere per se. You sound, on that call, not much different from democrats who assail the other side, get exposed for being wrong, then suddenly want to "change the tone" in Washington to sidestep the egg on their faces and make their opponents look like assailents in the wrong for responding and correcting the record. Negativity indeed! If I point out that a policy is damaging, is it factual if it is, or just negative. The difference is that between subjectivity and objectivity - or between having drank (or not) the koolaid. The fact is that the resultant damage is damage and is bad. And there is no way to objectively state that in a way that is positive. I can smile, dance, even sing it too you gleefully and it will still be negative because harming people is negative. So, I guess if we want to be positive, we should then rid ourselves of those who produced the negative result. I'm positive about that, btw.
Congrats, by the way, on being an uncle. I have three nephews, and they are a blast (I'm single and have no kids).
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.