Several employees at the Cleveland Freightliner plant have told the Post the plant will be closed from Aug. 7 to Aug. 11 — a period of five production days.
Employees say they will not be paid for this time unless they can arrange to take it as vacation. The plant, which employs almost 4,000 people, was also closed the week of July 4. None of the employees who talked to the Post was willing to be identified, although the notice was posted openly, and no one was available to comment officially.
Local Freightliner officials have standing instructions from corporate headquarters that all communication with the press must come from spokeswoman Debi Nicholson, in Portland, Ore. A Post reporter tried to get a response from the company on Wednesday and this morning, and Nicholson has not responded.
In May, Freightliner announced a “workforce adjustment” that eliminated 294 positions across the corporation. Of those, 66 were contractors on temporary assignments, mainly in engineering and information technology. One hundred seven regular full-time Freightliner employees were affected, but only four were at the Cleveland plant, which is still the county’s largest employer.
The rest were at corporate headquarters and the truck plant in Portland.
A Freightliner release at the time said North America’s trucking industry has been hard hit by drastically higher fuel prices, interest rates and driver shortages.
Other major heavy-truck manufacturing companies announced cutbacks in production and workforce reductions in late 1999 and early 2000.
In the May release, spokeswoman Nicholson said a “strong order backlog going into the downturn enabled the company to operate without reductions-in-force in its U.S. operations until now.”
At the time the company reduced production by eliminating overtime in the U.S. and Canadian operations and cutting back production in Mexico by about 60 trucks a day.
Also in May, Freightliner announced an $11.4 million, 58,000-square-foot expansion of its Gaffney, S.C., plant. The Gaffney plant builds chassis for a variety of light-duty vehicles, including a full line of shuttle buses, school buses, motor homes and delivery walk-in vans.
Since 1995, Freightliner has tripled the size of its work force in Gaffney from 213 to 750 people.
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