DETROIT _ The future of the Lordstown Assembly Plant in Ohio has been a friction point between General Motors and the UAW even before negotiations began this summer for a new contract and could have bearing on whether GM autoworkers are willing to ratify the proposed deal.

About 40 to 50 UAW members gathered outside Detroit’s Renaissance Center ahead of the UAW National GM Council meeting as well as inside the Marriott hotel where the meeting was held chanting “no product no vote.”

As UAW leaders Gary Jones and Terry Dittes descended the escalator to enter the ballroom ahead of the meeting, the protesters again shouted: “No product, no vote” and “Stop giving our jobs to Mexico!”

Reports on Lordstown’s fate conflicted after the union and GM reached a proposed tentative agreement, with the Wall Street Journal saying the automaker would invest, with partners, $1.3 billion near the idled factory and other accounts saying Lordstown was left out of the pact. The Journal report squares with Free Press reporting on a battery plant planned near the factory while GM works to sell the plant to an enterprise linked to electric truck maker Workhorse Group of suburban Cincinnati.

Justin Brown drove from Wentzville, Mo., to Detroit to participate in the protest. He worked 11 years at Lordstown before transferring to GM’s plan in Wentzville five months ago.

“I left my home and everything there in Lordstown,” said Brown. “If there’s nothing in this contract for Lordstown, my vote is no. If they won’t give it to us now then I don’t think we should settle the contract.”

Likewise, Tommy Wolikow said, “if they just throw Lordstown away, it’ll be a no for me.”

Wolikow works at Flint assembly, but he spent years working at Lordstown. He said if the 46,000 members are “true union brothers and sisters and know the meaning of solidarity, they’ll stick with us” and reject the proposed tentative contract.

“If there’s no product for Lordstown, my vote is no,” said William Goodchild, a laid-off Lordstown worker who came to GM’s headquarters to make sure UAW leaders know the Lordstown issue matters.

Goodchild, Wolikow, Brown and others at the rally said they are ready to stay on strike longer if need be to get a product for Lordstown. But Wolikow worries that some union members will see “the big carrot” GM has offered in the form of a ratification bonus of at least $9,000 and “be bought out” to ratify a tentative contract if the National GM Council recommends ratification.

Lordstown Mayor Arno Hill, who retired as a tool and die maker from Delphi Packard Electric Systems in 2004, said he had not been briefed by General Motors as of 10 a.m. Thursday.

“I haven’t had a heads up on anything,” Hill said. “I’m sure with GM their priority now is to get an agreement with the UAW.”

Right now, he said, much of the speculation is focusing on a scenario where the Workhorse buys the factory. The belief, he said, is that no product has been allocated by GM to Lordstown but nothing has been confirmed.

GM in November 2018 angered the UAW when it announced plans to idle four U.S. plants, including Lordstown, which shut down earlier this year when production of the small Chevrolet Cruze ended.

Known provisions of the proposed tentative agreement include:

_ UAW-represented GM workers will get a bonus of more than $9,000 upon ratification of the deal.

_ GM will invest in U.S. facilities to create and retain 9,000 jobs.

_ 3-4% wage and lump sum increases in alternating years.

_ As part of that investment, Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant will be retooled to build an electric pickup.

_ Temporary workers, who have been paid $15-19 an hour with inferior benefits to permanent autoworkers, get a path to a permanent role.

_ Newer union workers with two weeks’ vacation a year will get to take one of those weeks at their choosing. In the previous contract, these employees were required to take both paid vacation weeks during scheduled plant shutdowns. The second week of a plant shutdown would be considered a layoff, qualifying workers for unemployment.

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(c)2019 Detroit Free Press

Visit the Detroit Free Press at www.freep.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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KeyWords:: BC-UAW-STRIKE-LORDSTOWN:DE BC UAW STRIKE LORDSTOWN DE

Oct. 17–This week, Mack Trucks’ 1 million-square-foot assembly plant in Lower Macungie Township sits quietly — a place that has been a truck manufacturing hub for nearly 44 years suddenly idled. The usually jam-packed parking lot is as dead as a vacant Kmart.

But many of the plant’s more than 2,000 workers are still filtering in nearby — not for work, but for four-hour shifts at high-trafficked outposts around the plant as part of the first strike to hit Mack in 35 years. There, United Auto Workers Local 677 members are equipped with signs, red shirts reading “We Are One” and boxes of doughnuts or pizza stacked upon folding tables or opened tailgates.

The workers revel in the occasional morale-boosting honk from a passing vehicle, including one at 2 p.m. Tuesday from a truck they surely built: a white Mack Anthem day cab.

From the picket line to the union hall: The UAW has listed more than 15 issues that remain unsettled in its discussions with Mack, negotiations that won’t continue until Monday. While a lengthy list of topics remain open, local union officials on Tuesday said their top concern is ensuring the proper commitments are in place to make sure the Lower Macungie plant — and the Lehigh Valley, in general — remains the place where all heavy-duty Macks for the North American market are assembled.

“There was a letter in our contract that says you can’t take our Class 8 truck out of Macungie, and that’s the letter we’re looking to keep,” Kevin Fronheiser, the local’s shop chairman and a 20-year Mack employee, told The Morning Call. “Again, we want to make sure we’re building the truck here in the Lehigh Valley.”

Fronheiser said Mack has not said anything about moving production out of the Lehigh Valley, but the union is looking for protections that were included in previous contracts.

“We just want to cover it, though,” said Dave Durgin, a 31-year Mack employee and the local’s chairman of the office and engineering units. “We just want to make sure.”

In a statement over the weekend about the strike, which began at 11:59 p.m. Saturday and involves about 3,500 Mack employees across Pennsylvania, Maryland and Florida, Mack President Martin Weissburg said the company has no plans to shutter any U.S. manufacturing operations even as it competes against products made in lower-cost countries.

“On the contrary, we’ve invested more than $400 million in our plants and logistics network over the last ten years, and since 2015 have insourced work that has created more than 500 jobs in our U.S. factories,” Weissburg said. “We have significant new investments in both facilities and products on the way.”

While the previous investments Weissburg mentioned include about $84 million that went into the Lower Macungie plant, it could be those projects “on the way” that are causing some of the concern. While Weissburg’s statement said Mack has no plans to close any U.S. plants, Fronheiser noted that he didn’t explicitly say that all heavy-duty truck production would stay in the Lehigh Valley.

And Mack’s parent company, the Sweden-based Volvo Group, has a history of shifting operations between its U.S. facilities.

For example, about two years after acquiring Mack, Volvo in 2002 closed the manufacturer’s Winnsboro, South Carolina plant, an operation that opened in 1987 and replaced the 60-year-old 5C plant in Allentown just a couple years after Mack’s last strike in 1984. With the South Carolina plant closed, Volvo moved Mack production that was done in South Carolina to its New River Valley plant in Dublin, Virginia.

That highway model production continued at the New River Valley plant until 2009, when Volvo moved the work to the Lower Macungie plant. That move also corresponded with the relocation of Mack’s corporate headquarters from Allentown to the Greensboro, N.C., Volvo campus, which cost the Lehigh Valley hundreds of white-collar jobs but helped streamline certain functions between Mack and Volvo Trucks North America. Durgin mentioned Tuesday that his job was once in the Mack Boulevard headquarters before it was moved to the Mack Customer Center in Allentown and now the Lower Macungie plant.

A similar issue appears to have been raised during negotiations ahead of a three-year contract that was reached in October 2016, a deal that expired Oct. 1.

A Jan. 3, 2017, article on the UAW’s website stated that Mack wanted to delete a provision in the contract that required the company to get the union’s approval before it could open a new plant. An information request, the union says, revealed Mack was looking to eventually build a West Coast plant, something the union believed could threaten job security in Lower Macungie. In regards to this provision, Mack spokesman Christopher Heffner said the company prefers “not to discuss any provisions of our contract at this time.”

During a question-and-answer session in Allentown in August 2018, Weissburg said the Lower Macungie plant had been making impressive improvements and that Mack would continue to invest in the site as needed. When asked specifically about whether Mack could need another plant down the road, he responded, “It’s hard to forecast the future, but there’s ample room in the (Lehigh Valley Operations) factory right now.”

Another Mack facility does appear, however, to be in the works, though not necessarily one that will shift production from Lower Macungie.

Earlier this year, The Morning Call reported that Mack was advertising engineering positions in the Salem, Virginia, area, believed to be the spot where Mack will author its re-entrance into the medium-duty truck market. Volvo Group North America spokesman John Mies in February declined to talk about the project but noted it would not result in any shifting of production from Mack’s Lower Macungie plant, which focuses on Class 8 highway, construction and garbage trucks.

Still, Durgin said, the Virginia project did come up during negotiations.

“We know about it,” he said. “We’re not against it. We understand the company needs to keep making products and keep making money. We just want to have a part in that. But we know about it. We don’t have too many details on it yet.”

Also of note is an announcement in late June that Volvo will invest nearly $400 million over six years to upgrade its 1.6-million-square-foot New River Valley plant, a facility that employs more than 3,000 workers and produces all Volvo trucks sold in North America. The project, in which Volvo has said it will create 777 new jobs over the next six years, includes a new 350,000-square-foot building that will house truck cab welding operations and an expansion of the existing structure to improve the facility’s paint operations and production flow.

“NRV is painting some Mack cabs, so the enhancements to the plant’s paint operations will also benefit Mack,” Mies said in an email Tuesday.

More specifically, Mack purchases its sleeper cab from a third-party firm before the cab makes it way to Volvo’s New River Valley plant to be painted.

The cab is then shipped more than 400 miles from New River Valley — a plant where Mack highway models were once produced — to the Lower Macungie plant, where assembly occurs.

Morning Call reporter Jon Harris can be reached at 610-820-6779 or at jon.harris@mcall.com.

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(c)2019 The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.)

Visit The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) at www.mcall.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Sep. 8—CEDAR FALLS — Finding new talent is important to companies as they plan for future workforce needs. But even as Kevin Watje was hiring one such prospect this summer, the chief executive officer of Curbtender worried that he might have found someone too new.

Nathan Hoffman’s task was to design a lifting device for the garbage trucks Curbtender manufactures. The recent graduate of Cedar Falls High School only had a brief window in which to work, though. He was heading to college this fall.

Hoffman had been referred to Watje by Cedar Falls Community Schools’ Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) after going through its engineering program. He came with high recommendations on his abilities to do computer-aided design work.

Still, Watje admitted that he was skeptical. Then Hoffman started working.

“He picked it up right away and we were so impressed with that,” said Watje, professing amazement at how quickly the teenager became proficient. “In the six weeks he was here, he literally designed a product for us.”

The company needs to build a prototype yet, but the CEO has high hopes for the product and how it will position them in the market. “If that is successful, we’ll have a heck of a competitive advantage,” he said, over other garbage truck manufacturers.

Now Curbtender has two more students who’ve gone through CAPS, senior Frank Zhang and junior Jacob Smothers, designing an arm for a garbage truck. They are reverse engineering the arm based on an older product. Watje likes what he is seeing from the pair.

“It’s been a great experience for us,” he said.

While the students’ work at Curbtender is similar to what’s done in the CAPS program, in these cases they are directly paid employees of the company and not earning dual high school-college credit. But the company got interested in the students after it became a business partner with CAPS.

Ethan Wiechmann, director of the high school program, said those connections to the business community are what matter.

“The program gets a lot of people at the table,” he said. “The key to the success is everyone finding value.”

CAPS is touting some other recent successes, as well.

Students in last spring’s CAPS session designed a set of large banners for Cedar Falls Community Main Street that can now be seen hanging on posts by the library and between Second and Third streets. The program held its first summer CAPS session, from which Zhang and Smothers were recruited to work at Curbtender. And its officials are working with Jesup and Waterloo Columbus high schools to start their own Center for Advanced Professional Studies programs.

Teenage engineers

Curbtender’s hiring of students is “a great CAPS story,” said Wiechmann. “We’ve got a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old that are working as engineers on this project.”

Wiechmann said the district decided to hold the summer CAPS program, which enrolled five students, because of the difficulty some kids had in finding time in their schedule to take it.

Cedar Falls is part of a Center for Advanced Professional Studies network that includes 52 programs involving 106 school districts in 15 states and two countries. But the district was a pioneer with its summer offering. Aside from Cedar Falls Schools, “none of them have run an actual for-credit CAPS program in the summer,” he noted.

Both Zhang and Smothers are interested in studying engineering in college. They learned computer-aided design skills through the CAPS program and earlier Project Lead the Way classes.

“As we were going through CAPS, I was thinking these skills would help me get a job one day,” said Smothers. “I just didn’t realize how soon.”

Watje’s wife was at an event where the summer CAPS students were making presentations about their projects and alerted her husband that there were two more students with an interest in engineering that he may want to consider hiring. They started working for Curbtender about two weeks before school started and are continuing this fall after classes each day.

When they were offered the positions, “that was pretty surprising,” said Zhang. The boys are learning a lot about engineering and picking up some new skills related to the design program used by Curbtender.

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“It’s just a lot of new experiences here that we didn’t have to deal with in the classroom,” said Zhang. “So we’re learning here every day.”

Along the way, they’ve also made quite a bit of progress on the project. Once the design is done, a prototype will be made.

“We’ll start probably cutting steel for that in two weeks,” said Watje. “They’re going to see it to completion, is my hope.”

Afterward, “if they want to stay with us, we have another project for them,” he noted. “By the end of their school year, I’m hoping both of those projects are complete and in production.”

Main Street banners

The Community Main Street banner design, which includes the CAPS logo, was offered by the organization as a project for the program. It was chosen for the “design sprint” done by the full group over three days at the beginning of spring semester. CAPS students are otherwise divided between the Cedar Falls’ programs four “strands”: Robotics and engineering, solutions (which is business-focused), education, and medical and health services.

“This just happened to be a project that was on our list,” said Carol Lilly, executive director of Community Main Street. “This is kind of that basic set (of banners) that will go up that aren’t seasonal.”

Community Main Street officials gave the students design guidelines and received many proposals that a committee narrowed down before picking the winner. “It was really hard for our committee to pick from,” said Lilly. “There were so many good ideas.”

The design they chose includes a blue line through the center of the banner based on a satellite image of the Cedar River. Blocks of red, green and orange spread across it horizontally. Lilly said the ability to transfer the design to a banner and how colors matched the downtown area’s branding gave it an edge.

Participating in the CAPS can give businesses and organizations “an option for some of those projects you can’t get to,” she said. In addition, the program “helps foster the next generation of community leaders.”

Interest growing

Cedar Falls CAPS leaders are working across school lines to help their brand of career education proliferate. Teachers with Jesup and Columbus high schools are being trained so each can set up their own programs, which could begin second semester. Like the Cedar Falls program, the two schools will partner with businesses at off-campus locations to provide real-world career experiences.

“We think this model has some legs to it and a lot of potential,” said Wiechmann. “We just need to figure out all the bugs.”

Jesup’s program will be located in a building being renovated by its partners, Farmers State Bank and Heartland Technology.

“We’re pretty excited about it. From the sound of it, it will be a co-working space that will house CAPS,” said Paul Rea, Jesup High School principal. “I know that we had a lot of support from our businesses in Jesup.”

Daniel Thole, Columbus principal, said Cedar Valley Catholic Schools’ administrators were looking for career education with a variety of components including experiential learning and opportunities to give back to the community.

“The CAPS program really allows us to do that pretty easily,” he noted. “We’re very excited for the Cedar Valley to benefit from this as much as our students.”

Details are not yet worked out concerning partner businesses or the program’s location.

“We’re still in the planning stages of all those logistics,” said Thole. “The first step was to inform the (school) board of this. Now that is passed, we’re going to begin the rest of it.”

Rea said his school is piloting CAPS on behalf of Cedar Valley Northeast, a consortium of districts that work to provide common professional development opportunities to their staffs. Others in the group include the Denver, Dunkerton, Wapsie Valley, Tripoli, Sumner–Fredericksburg and Clarksville school districts. Some or all of them may be interested in implementing the program during future years.

“I feel like we’re doing everything to get prepared to give our kids a great learning experience,” said Rea.

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(c)2019 Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier (Waterloo, Iowa)

Visit Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier (Waterloo, Iowa) at www.wcfcourier.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.