Western North Carolina is about 600 miles from Detroit, but that hasn’t prevented hundreds of the region’s manufacturing workers from losing their jobs because of troubles in the automobile industry.
A Citizen-Times tally found that more than 330 employees at automobile component plants or similar facilities in the region have lost their jobs over the past year as a result of slumping car sales, and that figure almost certainly understates the auto-related job loss in the region’s manufacturing sector.
Auto parts probably don’t immediately come to mind as one of the region’s primary products, but Ray Denny, executive director of the Economic Development Coalition for Asheville-Buncombe County, said the dramatic downturn in car sales has had a significant impact on the regional economy.
More than 1,200 people work in the region at manufacturers that supply auto makers directly or sell to makers of components for new cars, the Citizen-Times found. In addition, there are a number of mostly smaller suppliers that are not included in the totals of jobs or layoffs, plus other jobs at local companies that sell to manufacturers in the field.
“It’s something that is extremely important to Western North Carolina,” he said. “You know the old saying, ‘GM sneezes and the country catches cold.’ It’s a crude metaphor, but it’s accurate.”
At the Continental brake caliper plant in Fletcher, workers have been catching furloughs, early retirement and shorter work weeks.
The plant supplies assembly plants in the United States that are owned by both domestic and foreign car makers, said Plant Manager Bobby Nelon. “We’ve got a broad base of customers and they’re all being impacted.”
The plants that Continental supplies “are doing short weeks where they don’t work 40 hours, they might work 32. … They might shut down an extra week at Christmas,” Nelon said. “It means that we do those same actions.”
About 20 of the plant’s workers took early retirement last year, leaving a workforce of about 330.
“Every person in the plant is feeling those effects” from the slowdown, Nelon said. “This group’s really pulling together in difficult times,” he said, but the worry that comes with not knowing what will happen next is tough.
“Every time there’s another meeting, (plant workers) wonder, ‘Could this affect me?’ Having uncertainty in your life is a difficult thing,” he said.
The explanation for the job changes is not difficult to understand: New car sales in the United States fell from 16.1 million in 2007 to 13.2 million last year.
“That’s a huge drop. I don’t care what the industry is, if you cut production that much … it’s going to be difficult,” said Dave Ladd, a spokesman for Dearborn, Mich.-based International Automotive Components.
IAC bought the former Collins & Aikman plant in Old Fort, which makes vehicle carpet and insulation, out of bankruptcy in 2007. It has seen both temporary and permanent layoffs since and currently employs about 500 people, Ladd said.
First materials costs skyrocketed, “Then we were hit with this economy,” he said.
Some of the materials IAC uses come from Janesville Acoustics facilities in Old Fort.
Business there is “just slow, slow, slow,” said operations manager Roy Heeralall. “We’re doing everything we can (to preserve jobs) but business is not there” and the current work force of 82 is about 40 percent lower than it was in mid-2008.
Don Bent, head of the BorgWarner factory in Fletcher, is one of hundreds or thousands of people in the automobile industry in the region who have been closing watching the debate over whether or how the federal government should help the domestic auto industry.
About 70 percent of the cooling and fan drives the plant makes for pickup trucks and larger vehicles go to Detroit’s Big Three automakers. The number of workers at the plant fell from about 370 to 200 during 2008 as domestic company have been particularly hard hit, and the plant cut work hours around Christmas and early this year, Bent said.
“We see the recent auto loans … as, yes, propping up those companies and those jobs, but also keeping our plant going,” he said.
BorgWarner also has a turbocharger factory in Avery’s Creek that employs about 650 people. It is in a different division and supplies commercial trucks and heavy equipment.
Problems in that industry are somewhat different from those in the automotive industry — jobs at the Avery’s Creek plant, the ArvinMeritor truck axle plant in Fletcher or makers of aftermarket car parts are not included in the Citizen-Times figures — but the credit crunch and economic slowdown have reduced demand.
As many as 150 temporary workers have been let go but fewer than 20 permanent BorgWarner workers have lost their jobs, said Pete Kohler, vice president and general manager.
Current employment figures for the ArvinMeritor plant were not available. The plant had about 550 workers in November, when its parent company said it was cutting employment companywide by 7 percent.
Another impact from the auto industry troubles is more difficult to measure: Jobs lost at companies that supply component makers.
Manufacturers in general pump money into the local economy with both their payroll and their purchases, Denny said. He recalled an incident within the past couple of years when he was discussing the local impact of a medium-sized injection molding plant with its manager. The manager, Denny said, pulled out a list of about 500 companies with local addresses that the plant had made at least one purchase from.
“There’s a ripple effect,” Denny said.
Source: Asheville Citizen Times
