Carper's Corner

Carper's Corner

DaimlerChrysler today announced plans to cut its North American workforce by 13,000 employees over the next several years. One of the two shifts at the Newark, Delaware plant -- numbering 700 employees -- would be "idled" at the end of June. A number of those employees would be transferred to a "Job Bank" and continue to draw most of their pay and benefits for the next year or so. The plant and most of its remaining 1,400 employees would continue to operate with one shift until the end of calendar year 2009, building Durangos and Chrysler Aspens all the while. If no new products were identified for the plant by then, the plant itself would be "idled."

While none of us regard any of this as "good" news, it could have been even worse. DaimlerChrysler officials could have announced plans to "close" the plant in a year or two. It's important to note that they did not do that. Instead, they left the door ever so slightly ajar to the possibility that if enough of the fifteen or so new vehicles the company will be launching this year and next catch on with consumers, and there's a need to preserve manufacturing capacity, Newark could live well beyond 2009.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. We've seen this movie before. In fact, we saw it 14 years ago. In November of 1992, GM announced it would be closing its plant outside of Wilmington along with more than a dozen other GM plants across North America. Why? Because the company's capacity to build vehicles exceeded demand for those vehicles. GM, however, didn't leave the door ajar in announcing its decision to shutter the plants. The decision was final, GM officials said. End of discussion.

Sure enough, one by one, the targeted plants were closed. All, I believe, but one. The Boxwood Road plant here never closed. It was idled for a while and may have gone to a one-shift operation for a while, but it never closed. Today, the Boxwood Road plant is a three-shift operation where roughly 2,000 employees build two popular roadsters -- the Pontiac Solstice and the Saturn Sky. Customers in the U.S. and Europe snap them up almost as fast as they roll off the assembly line.

As we listen to the sobering news from DaimlerChrysler this week, we should stop and ask what - if any - lessons can we take from that harrowing experience nearly 14 years ago? The answer is "plenty."

Then, and now, the work force at GM's Boxwood Road plant enjoyed a stellar reputation within the company. In fact, its commitment to quality, productivity and good labor-management relations was second to none within GM. "Why would you close one of your best plants?" I asked GM CEO Jack Smith in a 1993 meeting in Detroit with him and UAW Vice-President for GM Steve Yokich. He explained that the vehicles assembled at Boxwood Road - the Chevrolet Corsica and Beretta - were nearing the end of their product life cycle and would be phased out in a year or two. It didn't make a lot of sense, Smith said, to spend a bundle of cash to retool a plant - even one with a good reputation - to build new or different models, especially when GM already had more manufacturing capacity than it needed.

The reaction to the grim news by the employees at Boxwood Road, along with their local UAW leaders and the plant's managers, surprised a lot of people. Rather than give up, they worked even harder and smarter, too. They focused even more on raising productivity, improving quality and fostering better labor-management relations. Encouraged by both labor leaders and plant managers, the work force adopted the Saturn operating agreement for the Boxwood Road plant, clearly signaling their commitment to innovation and to thinking outside the box.

When the economy began rebounding in 1994, and GM 's market share stabilized, the company needed a place to build some of its new products. Delaware got the nod.

If history is to repeat itself here in the First State, the well-regarded work force at DaimlerChrysler's Newark plant, led by its local union leaders and plant managers, needs to focus like never before in the months ahead on productivity and quality, on labor-management relations and on innovation so that if a number of DaimlerChrysler's new product offerings do take off in the marketplace, and the company needs to add or preserve capacity somewhere, Newark is the obvious choice.

But that alone is not enough. Equally important, DaimlerChrysler has to bring to showrooms across America vehicles that customers want to buy. Vehicles that are eye-catching and highly reliable as well as more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. The company needs to take a page out of Toyota's book and move expeditiously into flexible manufacturing where as many as three or four different models are built under the same roof, and readiness for launching yet another new vehicle is underway.

State and local officials, fresh from completing a much-needed overhaul of the workers' compensation program here, must continue to find other ways to provide in our state a more nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation in our state, particularly with respect to manufacturing jobs.

Also, our congressional delegation should continue to support smart R&D funding in promising new technologies like next-generation lithium-ion batteries for the flex-fuel plug-in hybrid vehicles that will start appearing on America's roads within the next decade. We should insist that the federal government use its purchasing power on both the civilian and defense sides to help commercialize promising new automotive technologies. We ought to continue to support tax credits to incentivize consumers to purchase innovative products like highly-energy-efficient hybrids and energy-efficient low-emission diesel-powered vehicles that run on bio-fuels. And while we're at it, we need to be on the lookout for possible currency manipulation by other countries seeking to gain advantage for their products, even as we redouble our efforts to rein in the growth of health care costs in the U.S., costs which add close to $1,500 to the price of vehicles made in America.

In short, there's plenty for a lot of us to focus on in the months ahead as we pull together in an effort to save the Newark plant and put it in position to offer good-paying jobs for years to come. If each of us does his or her part, lightning might strike again, just like it did on Boxwood Road more than a dozen years ago. Sometimes miracles do happen, but hoping for one isn't enough. We've got to work hard. We've got to work as a team. And, most importantly, as long as there is hope, we can't give up.

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