“They are leaving us basically to fend for ourselves”
Detroit GM workers speak on layoffs as deadline draws near
By
Shannon Jones
25 February 2017
Workers at the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant are watching the clock tick down toward a scheduled March 3 date for the elimination of the second shift at the facility, impacting some 1,300 jobs.
The company announced the job cuts in December, claiming it needs to reduce inventories. The factory builds Cadillac CT6, Chevrolet Impala and the Buick LaCrosse sedans. The cuts will affect full-time GM employees, part-time workers and contract workers for GM Manufacturing Subsystems LLC.
The layoffs at the Detroit-Hamtramck facility follow 2,000 layoffs last month at the Lordstown, Ohio plant, outside Warren, and the Lansing Grand River factory in Michigan. They are the first job cuts by GM since 2010 and point to a slowing of the sales boom over the last six years.
The layoffs will add to an already high official unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent in Detroit, the poorest big city in America. The Detroit-Hamtramck plant is the only GM facility remaining in the city.
The World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter spoke to several workers who stopped by a pizzeria down the street from GM. Toya, a young worker at the GM Detroit-Hamtramck factory, said the layoff announcement initially came as a shock to her.
“They basically promised us job security,” she said. “They made it seem we would be hired in after a certain amount of months, but it wasn’t anything like that. We get 20 weeks unemployment benefits, that’s all.”
In 2011, Michigan reduced the maximum eligibility period for unemployment benefits from 26 to 20 weeks, one of the shortest benefit periods in the US. The state recently…