GM bankruptcy will devastate communities

[Hannah Bell]

The closures will devastate cities and towns in Michigan, where half of the shutdowns will take place, and in Indiana, Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee and Virginia. Somewhere between 18,000 and 20,000 workers will lose their jobs, according to GM. These workers will be turned out into the worst job market since the Great Depressions. In addition, scores of auto dealerships will shut down across the US.

Michigan already has the highest unemployment rate in the US. Six plants will be closed in the industrial state. The Pontiac Truck and Bus plant...Powertrain factories at Livonia, Flint and Ypsilanti...A Grand Rapids stamping plant...

GM’s Pontiac stamping and Lake Orion assembly plants will be placed on “standby.” Workers could be called back in the unlikely scenario that demand for GM vehicles increases. One newspaper reported that idled workers would receive 75 percent pay for a “limited amount of weeks.”

Ohio will lose a GM service and parts warehouse in Columbus, a powertrain factory in Parma...and a stamping plant in Mansfield some time next year. A stamping plant will also be closed in neighboring Indiana, at Indianapolis.

The last auto plant on the East Coast will disappear with GM’s closure of its Wilmington, Delaware assembly plant...A service and parts warehouse will also close outside Boston, Mass.

An assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee will be idled. A powertrain factory in Fredericksburg, Virginia, will close...a warehouse distribution center will be shut down in Jacksonville, Florida. The Shreveport, Louisiana plant that produces Hummer SUVs was not slated for closure, but its demise is likely as GM is attempting to sell off the brand.

By the end of 2010, GM will have only 34 US plants, down from 47 at the start of the current year.
Additionally, GM will close almost all of its factories for 11 weeks this summer...

The idled plants in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and Lake Orion, Michigan, along with a previously closed plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, will likely be pitted against each other in competition for production of a new subcompact car...

The shutdown of the Pontiac Truck and Bus plant, also known as Pontiac East Assembly, will devastate the city of Pontiac, Michigan, which is already impoverished by decades of factory closings and layoffs. About 1,100 workers will lose their jobs....Pontiac will lose about 20 percent of its current tax base, or about $10 million...

Fred Leeb, the city’s emergency financial manager...was quick to announce...“We fear that we are going to have to cut even more deeply,” he told the Detroit News. “And there will be concessions to ask from the (city) unions.”

...The local political elites in Michigan are vying with each other to shift the burden of GM’s bankruptcy on workers in neighboring cities. Democratic Detroit Mayor David Bing has announced he will consider a package of tax incentives to keep GM’s corporate headquarters in the city to fight off a rival bid from nearby Warren, Michigan...

Jeff, who has worked for five years at Pontiac Truck and Bus, said he doubted the mass layoffs would launch a rebirth of the industry, as President Barack Obama has claimed.

“This is not going to save the industry,” he said. “They spun off Delphi and laid off thousands and it didn’t stop the bankruptcy. There were bad management decisions, but the banks made conditions for the auto industry to fail. Nobody is buying vehicles; there’s been a 50 percent decline. How can people buy cars if they’re losing their jobs and homes?

“Wall Street got trillions from the government. All those guys in finance get their bonuses. It’s pathetic. Now someone is going to the bank on GM and Chrysler. It’s going to be the investors and people who are already rich, not me and you.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/gmba-j02.shtml

[Mind_your_head]

1. " Six plants will be closed in the industrial state"

Michigan (nor the USA) will be considered the "industrial state" any longer. That's "legend".....long gone myth, not true anymore.

[NJCher]

2. I feel for these people

It must be hell to live in an area where one industry dominates and to be turned out in the cold like this, with no way to make a mortgage payment, buy food, keep a child in college.

Somehow we will all get through it but it looks painful as hell right now.


Cher

[Hannah Bell]

3. No, not all of us will get through it, & that's the cold hard truth.

[NJCher]

4. I know

I saw the thread on the country with a government that laid off all those people and how they are expecting a lot of suicides. I thought that this wasn't that much different. I did not want to say that, though.

I can only pray that Obama gets some stimulus money in there and fast, too.


Cher

[eilen]

6. Remember Pittsburgh, after the steel industry

there put out the fires in the 1980's?


It was a very depressing time.

[sandyj999]

5. In my wildest imagination I never thought this would happen.

Well not until the last fifteen years when I could see it coming. And many people have no idea about how the "trickle down" will effect their lives also.

[fasttense]

7. Obama needs to put into place another Civil Works Administration.

The CWA under FDR created more than 4 million jobs in just 2 months. Though it focused on public works jobs it directly hired workers and went out and built projects. They did not use cumbersome contracting out methods and did a remarkable job at creating jobs.

"But the CWA also provided considerable white-collar work, employing, among others, statisticians, bookbinders, architects, 50,000 teachers, and 3,000 writers and artists. ("Hell, they've got to eat like other people," Hopkins noted matter-of-factly.) This was achieved with a remarkable minimum of overhead. Of the nearly $1 billion—the equivalent today of nearly $16 billion—that Hopkins spent during the CWA's five-month existence, 80 percent went directly into workers' pockets and thence stimulated the economy by going into the cash registers of grocers and shop owners. Most of the rest went to equipment costs. Less than 2 percent paid for administration."

http://www.slate.com/id/2209781/

[blindpig]

8. Well, there's a shovel ready job.

Bury the UAW.

k&r