Many Goodyear Workers Gone; Friday Shift Final Chapter

TylerPaper.com, December 28, 2007

Although Tuesday is the official date for a large layoff at Tyler's Goodyear plant, many of the workers are already gone.
Jim Wansley, president of United Steelworkers Local 746L, indicated some workers had other things on their minds than showing up for a final day.
"There were only two workdays this week - today and tomorrow," Wansley said Thursday. "And some of them had some vacation days, and they're taking them. ... They actually built their last tires on Friday of last week."
Wansley, who is one of the approximately 550 people leaving the company Tuesday, said the workers will file out the gate at the end of their individual shifts.
A much smaller number of workers will be retained temporarily and will leave at later dates.
They will initially stay at the plant to train other people, and another group will participate in a transition of the area of the plant in which tires were made.
This second group will move some equipment, clean up and ship tires from the warehouse, Wansley said.
Goodyear will retain a mixing operation in Tyler, and rubber will be mixed there for use by other plants.
"We'll just have one end of the plant running and we'll just be mixing rubber," Wansley said. "Everything will just be on a much smaller scale, and without anything associated with tire production."
When the few workers who are staying past Tuesday for training and transitioning are finished with their duties, they will be laid off. Wansley said he did not know how long they would remain in the plant, but, when they leave, the plant will employ about 135 people.
"There will be several weeks before the tires that are in that plant now will be shipped out," he said. "(The warehouse) holds a quarter of a million tires."
Last year, during negotiations for a new master contract, the USW was only able to receive a company commitment that it would keep the plant open through 2007. Shortly thereafter, Goodyear announced tire production at the plant would cease after this year.
A corporate spokesman previously said the decision to cease tire production was the result of costs it would require to modify the plant to produce tires that bring greater revenue.
The Tyler plant received new machinery in recent years to make the more profitable tires, and it had modified some of its existing machinery to do the job, but the company stuck to its plan.
A work force reduction earlier this year left the plant at between 650 and 750 hourly employees.
The workers took buyout offers and early retirement.
Wansley said the local economy will feel the loss of jobs at Goodyear.
A study by Impact DataSource in 2005 showed the Goodyear plant's economic impact totaled $161 million per year statewide.
At 1,075 jobs at the time of the study, salaries totaled $70 million, and economic output reached $388 million.
But the jobs at Goodyear helped create other jobs in the sectors of the economy that supplied the plant. Indirect and induced economic output was $560 million, and salaries $91 million.
Tom Mullins, Tyler Economic Development Council president and chief executive officer, previously said the ripple effect of the layoffs to other jobs will be significant.