Old Saturn Plant Could Get a Second Chance (contract saves jobs headed to Mexico)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/business/gms-former-saturn-plant-in-spring-hill-tenn-may-reopen.html?_r=1


A sign pointing the way to the shuttered General Motors plant in Spring Hill. Josh Anderson for The New York Times

By NICK BUNKLEY and BILL VLASIC
Published: September 22, 2011

SPRING HILL, Tenn. — When General Motors stopped building cars here two years ago, as the auto industry hit rock bottom and tens of thousands of assembly-line jobs evaporated nationwide, Chad Poynor packed up and moved to Michigan to keep working at another plant.

Mr. Poynor said he made the nine-hour drive back to Tennessee to see his wife and three children 24 times in the first year alone. “I’d go back tomorrow if I could,” Mr. Poynor said Wednesday after finishing his overnight shift in Lansing, Mich.

He and hundreds of other autoworkers may get that chance.

In a glimmer of light in a mostly downbeat economy, G.M. and the United Automobile Workers union have agreed to give the plant here a second chance as part of a tentative new labor contract. It is highly unusual for an automaker to bring jobs back to a factory all but left for dead, and several G.M. plants, including Spring Hill, will be adding work that had been headed to Mexico.

“I actually have a smile on my face today,” Mike O’Rourke, the president of U.A.W. Local 1853 in Spring Hill, said after learning the details of the contract. “It was very much gloom and doom. I lost all my hair and gained 50 pounds.”

The resurrection of Spring Hill would be another milestone in the fortunes of the domestic auto industry and, in particular, G.M.’s comeback from its government bailout and bankruptcy in 2009. The promise in the new contract of 6,400 jobs over the next four years, including 1,700 here, is being seen as a vote of confidence that autoworkers in the United States, even unionized ones, can compete with lower-wage nations.

FULL 6 page story at link.

[sunflowerseed]

1. Cool!

[Historic NY]

2. Who would have thought, keeping GM around would ever pan out..

[madrchsod]

3. spring hill was built with canadian steel untill....

the iron workers noticed the nws&w usa stamped on the beams.they refused to weld canadian steel and the entire beam contract was given to the 24" rolling mill.proud day for us at the 24" rolling mill...!

the 24" rolling mill as shut down and it was fed into the furnace that produced it`s steel.