GM seeks 750 temps to replace 1,300 Spring Hill

[Flybrian]

Tuesday, 07/11/06

GM seeks 750 temps to replace 1,300 Spring Hill early retirees

150 down, 600 to go as automaker scurries to train new workers

By BUSH BERNARD

Staff Writer

General Motors Corp. will hire as many as 750 temporary workers this year for its Spring Hill plant, to fill spots left vacant by workers taking early retirement and buyouts.

The company has 150 on board now and plans to add 600 more as it loses more than 1,300 longtime employees as part of a work-force reduction.

GM is shutting down a half-dozen assembly lines — including one of the two lines in Spring Hill — to bring production in line with shrinking sales.

The company won't need the 5,000 people it has now on the assembly line in Spring Hill when production of the Ion ends later this year. But it will need more than the 3,600 that will be left after all of the people opting for buyouts are gone.

GM has already begun training temporary employees to fill in.

"We anticipated there would be a significant outflow of people," GM spokesman Dan Flores said.

It's a process under way in almost all of GM's plants, where more than 35,000 employees nationwide have opted to leave the company as part of GM's restructuring plan.

"It's a significant process," Flores said. "We've been working on this for several months."

Technically, the temporary workers don't work for GM, although the company is dictating how they are screened and trained.

The only way to get a temporary job at the plant is to be recommended by a GM employee. That's a system that has worked well for the company in the past, GM spokesman Tom Wickham said.

The idea behind employee referrals is that people who work on the assembly line will recommend someone who will do well on the job. Otherwise, it looks bad for the person who recommended them, Wickham said.

"We get excellent referrals."

The temporary workers will get paid $18-$19 an hour, significantly less than the $28-an-hour base pay most Spring Hill assembly line workers get. Temporary workers won't get any of the company's benefits, such as health-care insurance or retirement. They're being hired through Developmental Dimensions International, a Pennsylvania company that's handling temporary workers at all GM plants.

Temporary workers are a growing trend in the automotive industry. Most automakers hire people part-time during the summer, when vacations thin worker

ranks.

Nissan North America, for instance, hires college students who are children of employees to fill manpower gaps on the production line at its Smyrna assembly plant during summer months, Nissan spokeswoman Vicki Smith said.

This will be the third time the Spring Hill plant has hired temporary workers, said Mike Herron, chairman of United Auto Workers Local 1853, which represents hourly employees at the plant.

The first time was in 1995, when more than 300 workers were hired.

"After they were in the plant for a year, we basically demanded they be made permanent because they were no longer temporary employees," Herron said. "They'd been there for a year. They were doing the work of regular team members. The only thing they were lacking was benefits."

Another 200 workers were hired in late 2001, to help the company start production of the Vue. That time, the company took applications from the public and got more than 2,000 job seekers in one day at a state jobs office in Columbia.

The workers were let go after a few months, Herron said.

There's no chance that the temporary workers hired this time will become permanent, Flores said.

"We have been very clear with the temporary employees that these are just temporary jobs and as of right now, we have no plans of hiring any new employees. They are definitely being brought in on a temporary basis." •

[Matt276]

18$ an hour instead of 28$+health care. That's a lot of savings. Too bad it did not happen 5 years ago.

[Drew Dowdell]

and if the UAW weren't there they could be hired at $18 and hour plus co-insurance.

Does any non-unionized company pick up the entire tab for healthcare anymore?

[Spike]

18$ an hour instead of 28$+health care. That's a lot of savings. Too bad it did not happen 5 years ago.

165264[/snapback]

Whatever staffing agency GM will be using also gets paid. Typically the client, GM, will be charged 1.5 times what the employee makes. This amounts to roughly the same rate per hour. The savings comes not only in benefits, as mentioned, but also overhead costs such as payroll, HR staff, workers comp insurance, etc....

Edited July 11, 2006 by Spike

[76ChevyTrucker]

It sounds like a good move to save some money overall, but what if things happen to get where they need the temp workers for longer than a couple of months? Are they going to gripe and moan until they're made full-status workers, or are they going to be let go of and another round of temps brought in?