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from the continuing-downward-spiral-for-workers dept.
The World Socialist Web Site reports:
In spite of a continuous chorus in the media of a booming economy creating robust job numbers, General Motors is unleashing a new round of attacks on autoworkers in North America as part of a global cost-cutting offensive against the working class.
The corporation announced on [April 13] it will cut one of two operating shifts at its massive Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant, cutting as many as 1,500 jobs effective June 15. As recently as 2016, the plant was operating three shifts around the clock with nearly 4,000 workers. By the end of June only 1,500 will remain.
As sales for the compact Chevy Cruze, the only vehicle produced at the facility, began to slip, GM shuttered the third shift in January 2017, axing 800 jobs. Over the course of 2017, the plant was idled for weeks at a time and rumors began to circulate about the impending layoffs.
As an indication of the severity of the cuts, this is the first time since the recession of the 1980s that the plant will operate with only one shift.
[...] The company sold 450,000 fewer vehicles to dealers last year than they did in 2016, but because of aggressive cost-cutting attacks on the workers, imposed by the union, which include everything from an expansion of Temporary Part Time employees at less than half pay, widespread layoffs and shutdowns[,] GM pretax profits for 2017 topped $12.8 billion.
US passenger car sales are on track to decline for the fifth straight year while sales of light trucks are setting records. US sales of compact cars dropped 10 percent in the first quarter and 5.8 percent through 2017.
Lordstown is not the only plant affected by this shift. GM's Detroit-Hamtramck factory, for example, relies heavily on production of small and midsize sedans, including the Buick LaCrosse, Cadillac CT6, Chevrolet Impala, and the Chevrolet Volt. In October, the automaker announced plans to cut about 200 jobs there and halt production beginning November 20 through the Christmas break, affecting 1,500 jobs over the holidays. The second shift was eliminated in March 2017, eliminating 1,300 jobs.
[...] The same conditions are developing in [GM] factories everywhere as GM pursues its cost-cutting strategy with a vengeance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @03:40PM
The problem of the rust belt has nothing to do with capitalism, a lot to do with the lack of nationalism. What do you Socialists dislike the most? Nationalists, because your just a bunch of statist globalist tyrants are what you are who wants to use open borders to drive people into poverty so they can be more easily duped into accepting your little authoritarian schemes. The ideas of open borders and free trade are whats destroying working class people, having to compete with cheap foreign alien immigrant labor and with products made in third world countries where you can hire people for cents an hour. Close the borders, implement fair tariffs and understand that trade between first and third world countries is a race to the bottom that will make first world countries like third world countries. The economies are fundamentally different and incompatable.