Goodyear Closure Deadline Looms

(Akron/Tire Review – Tyler Morning Telegraph) By Thursday November 1, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. employees at the Tyler plant may know more about what the company plans to do with the facility – and their jobs – at the start of the New Year. Then again, they may not know a whole lot more than they do now. In December 2006, the United Steelworkers ratified a three-year master contract with Goodyear that stipulated the company would keep the Tyler plant open at least one year. The next month, Goodyear, in a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, indicated it might close the plant in the first three months of 2008. Companies must file a Form 8-K to announce major events of which their shareholders should be aware.

The master contract, however, contained a provision that set a November 1, 2007, closure notification deadline, said Jim Wansley, president of USW Local 746L, the local union representing Tyler Goodyear workers. “If they are going to close the plant in the first six months of 2008, they have to give us their plan, in writing, by November 1,” Wansley said. Steelworkers and company officials met in mid October, but Wansley said Goodyear officials would not give the union a definite answer. “They haven’t given us a closure notice,” he said. “Although they have hinted around that there are several things that are being looked at, they can’t give us a definitive answer on what they’re going to do.”

Wansley speculated the company might say what its plans for the Tyler plant are when it announces its third-quarter financial results. A few hundred employees have taken early retirement or buyout packages offered by Goodyear. Now, Wansley said, hourly employees at the plant probably total between 730 and 750; salaried employees total about 60; and contract employees performing salaried functions total about 60. “There’s a lot of anxiety in the plant; there’s a lot of, ‘I’d like to know what my future is,'” the union president said.

If the company says nothing about the Tyler plant’s future by Thursday, it cannot close the plant during the first six months of 2008, Wansley said. That’s not to say the company cannot lay off workers or take other actions while not closing the plant. He said there is much discussion between the company and union as to what the company’s contractual obligations are regarding the Tyler plant, “and the Steelworkers are doing everything within the contract language they have to keep this plant open.”

Despite its workers knowing the sun may be setting on the Tyler Goodyear plant, the facility remains one of the best-producing Goodyear plants, and it has one of the best safety records. “We’re supposed to run 10,000 tyres a day and we’re running 25,000 tyres a day, and they’re selling everything they can get,” Wansley said. “The folks in Tyler have done everything they can to make it a bad business decision to close the plant.” Goodyear previously said it expected the closure to be completed in the first quarter of 2008, at a cost between $155 million and $160 million. It said the plant’s closure should generate an annual cost savings of about $50 million.