Announcement on Freightliner second shift this morning

By Scott Jenkins

sjenkins@salisburypost.com

CLEVELAND — The company that owns Freightliner is planning to announce the return of a full second shift at its truck building plant here, according to a letter sent out to union members.

Daimler Trucks North America said Wednesday it plans a “major announcement” at the plant this morning. Roger Nielsen, chief operating officer of Daimler Trucks North America, will be joined by Gov. Beverly Perdue and other officials.

The advisory gave no details about the announcement.

Town officials in Cleveland said they received invitations to the event, but have not been told what will be announced. Commissioner Mary Frank Fleming-Adkins said she’s heard it’s about jobs.

“It’s only going to be a good thing, from what I understand,” she said.

According to a letter to union members signed by United Auto Workers Local 3520 President Corey Hill, the company plans to “start ramping up production to a full second shift” at the Cleveland plant by mid-February.

The company then plans to increase production to 150 trucks a day by the fourth quarter of this year, the letter said. If that projection becomes reality, “we will exhaust our current recall list,” bringing laid-off employees back to work, the letter said.

Emanuel Parker, who was laid off from Freightliner three years ago this month, said he’s “hoping and praying” that’s the case.

Since being laid off, Parker said, he’s looked for work all over the region.

“I’ve looked here, Charlotte, Lexington, Albemarle Concord, you name it,” he said. “I’ve been everywhere.”

Many times, he said, employers who had jobs didn’t want to hire him because they were afraid that after they’d trained him, he’d be called back to Freightliner.

After his unemployment benefits expired last year, Parker withdrew money from his retirement account, bought a foreclosed house outright and paid up the taxes and insurance for a year. He’s been living as frugally as possible and doing what he could to make extra money, but he’s close to exhausting his savings.

So when he heard Freightliner was about to recall laid-off workers, Parker called a friend who told him 100 recall letters had been mailed and 100 more were expected to go out within a couple of weeks. He called the personnel department at the plant and was told he was No. 240 on the recall list, which goes by seniority.

“They didn’t say how many they were going to call back,” he said. “They’re going to open up a second shift, so they’re going to need more than 240 people to run that shift, I know that.”

The 48-year-old hopes that means that by February, he’ll be back to building trucks.

“I’m ready to go back to work,” he said.

Robert Van Geons, executive director of RowanWorks Economic Development, said his agency and the N.C. Department of Commerce have been working with Daimler. He declined to divulge details of the announcement, however.

“Let’s just say, from what I’ve heard, it would be a very positive thing for our community,” he said.

A Daimler spokeswoman did not return a telephone call or email from the Post.

Layoffs in 2007 and 2008 decimated the workforce at Cleveland’s Freightliner plant, which once employed 4,000 people and manufactured 220 trucks per day.

Employment fell to 695 workers, and production bottomed out at 32 trucks per day. Rowan County and the town of Cleveland gave Freightliner economic incentives in 2009 to protect the remaining jobs and begin production of military vehicles.

When Nielsen came to Cleveland in April 2011 to promote a solar farm installed at the plant by Duke Energy, employment had gone back up to about 1,100.

Nielsen announced then that the company would be recalling an additional 225 workers previously laid off at the plant and might restore a second shift there if market conditions continued to improve.

“There is a strong customer need for trucks,” Nielsen said in April.

Hill, president of UAW Local 3520, said the company had been ramping up production and recalling workers throughout 2011. Employment at the plant is up to about 1,500 now, he said.

“We’ve been gradually growing throughout the whole year,” he said Wednesday. “Not anything major, but it’s been steady; our orders and production have steadily gone up.”

In the letter to UAW members, Hill credited the union’s “Buy American Campaign” with helping to increase orders from Freightliner. By November, the union had contacted nearly 1,500 trucking companies and urged them to buy American-made trucks.

Hill said he sees “pretty good growth for 2012” and while he declined Wednesday to discuss the planned announcement, he said it’s “going to be good news.”

The company has been adding jobs elsewhere as well.

In June, the company added nearly 700 manufacturing jobs at its Mount Holly and Gastonia plants. That included a second shift in Mount Holly and meant the company had recalled most of the laid-off workers at those plants, the Gaston Gazette reported.

Fleming-Adkins said if the company adds the hundreds of jobs a second shift could require in Cleveland, that’s good news not just for the town or Rowan County, but for the region. And she said it’s especially good news for the laid-off workers waiting to reclaim their livelihoods.

“If that’s the situation, that’s 500 house payments. That’s 500 people going to the grocery store and feeling good about buying groceries. That’s 500 people buying insurance,” she said. “That’s going to affect everything.”

The announcement in Cleveland is scheduled for 9:30 this morning.

Freightliner Trucks is the largest division of Daimler Trucks North America, which is headquartered in Portland, Ore.