Nuru said:
Actually, all the TVs and other electronics for the most part are made overseas and built overseas. I lot of components are manufactured where they can be the cheapest and then larger components are produced and then sent to the assembly site, which now is typically by continenct. That is why you can get a car that is made in Canada/Mexico/US and it has components made in a lot of other countries. Strange things is that a lot of circuitry is made here, sent overseas integrated with other devices into components and then sent back here for final assembly. Final assembly can be as simple as putting the wheels and seats on a tractor to total assembly of a group of components.
I did consulting with GE on and off...watched them close their Portsmouth, VA facility after they bought RCA...and then I read this article of what happened to the guys who moved from VA to IN...
RCA parent's abrupt move puts 990 out of work; shutdown ends era of TV manufacturing in state
March 17, 2004
MARION, Ind. -- At 10:20 a.m. Tuesday morning, Enett Balderas was working on the line that bakes glass for television picture tubes at the Thomson plant here when her supervisor walked over with some devastating news.
The massive plant was shutting down. Immediately. She and her 989 fellow employees in Marion were out of jobs.
"We're done," the supervisor told Balderas. "I'm not messing with you."
Tuesday also made Indiana history.
The closing marks the end of the company's 75-year history of making radios and televisions in Indiana. RCA, later bought by Thomson, purchased a radio tube plant in Indianapolis in 1929. Since then, its factories have produced millions of radios, black-and-white and color television sets and the components inside them at plants in Bloomington, Indianapolis and Marion. Just 15 years ago, the 50 millionth RCA color TV was built in Bloomington -- at that time the world's largest TV assembly plant.
Thomson's announcement surprised and angered many of its 990 Marion employees. Also caught off guard were city and state officials, including Gov. Joe Kernan.
Company spokesman Dave Arland said Thomson's operations in Carmel were not impacted. That building houses the North American consumer-product headquarters and employs 1,000, although it also has eliminated a couple hundred workers in the past year, many through buyouts.
Company officials said the Marion jobs were being eliminated, not transferred overseas. But these Marion workers clearly lost their jobs because of the movement of television manufacturing out of the United States, consumer demand for low prices and changes in television technology.
In Marion, people had been talking about the possibility that the plant, which employed 2,470 workers at its peak in October 1994, might lose more work. That concern was stoked by last summer's dismissal of almost half its work force -- 820 workers.
But workers interviewed here Tuesday say they expected a complete closure would not be coming soon -- even after the company opened a Mexican picture tube plant a few years ago and launched a joint venture in China in November.
Thomson's decision thrusts Marion, also home to a major General Motors Corp. metal stamping plant, into the center of the policy -- and political -- debate in Indiana about how to stem the loss of manufacturing jobs. The state has shed about 95,000 factory jobs since 2000.
Kernan immediately dispatched a rapid-response team from the state Department of Workforce Development. His rivals dispatched pointed comments, contending Kernan's lack of leadership contributed to the plant's closing.
The governor also said he was dismayed by the secrecy surrounding the announcement and the way employees were allowed to come to work and then be sent home. He said his office received confirmation only around midday Tuesday.
"It's unfortunate that people showed up at work this morning and apparently had no idea that this was coming," Kernan said.
Marion Mayor Wayne Seybold added he "didn't see it coming" until he was notified at noon Tuesday.
Thomson spokesman Richard Knoph said the short notice was the product of the way the decision was made.
A cost-cutting proposal was put before the Thomson board in Paris on Friday, he said. The board decided to let the company's top executives, through its investment committee, make the final call. That committee met Monday night, Paris time, or Monday afternoon in Indiana. Thomson officials at the North American headquarters near Carmel weren't notified until Tuesday morning and then began making calls to union and public officials.
Besides the Marion plant, a Thomson plant that makes glass for picture tubes in Circleville, Ohio, also will be shuttered in three months, putting 545 people out of jobs.
Thomson blamed the shutdown on the slow U.S. economy, which is limiting American sales of Thomson-made television sets. Thomson projects an 11 percent sales decline from 2000 to 2006.
But the job loss has international roots.
The same kind of picture tubes made in Marion are built at a Thomson plant in Mexicali, Mexico. That facility began production in September 2001. The 1,850 people there make an average hourly wage of $2.30. The 865 hourly workers left at the Marion plant earned, on average, $15.98 an hour. Still, Knoph said, the pay at the Mexico plant, along the border with California, is several times what a Mexican worker makes in the central part of that country.
Knoph also confirmed that two of the tube manufacturing lines, ones shut down with last year's layoffs, are headed overseas. One is going to a plant in China owned by Thomson.
"We are expanding in China," he said, and it is more cost-effective to have the tubes made near the Chinese plants that assemble televisions for the Chinese market.
None of that provided solace for the employees at the Marion plant, who will be paid and keep their benefits for 90 days -- 30 more than required by federal law for major plant closings -- and receive job counseling and placement help starting Monday.
"It's so unreal the way they told us," said the glass-line worker Balderas. "They could have told us a different way, like at the end of the shift."
Balderas, 42, a Marion resident and 16-year employee, had come in especially early Tuesday to start her shift in the glass-baking area at 3 a.m.
Company officials conducted formal meetings to notify employees.
Dan Strausbaugh, 55, a second-shift electrician who lives in Gas City, got the news in a phone call from a friend who was at the plant about 11 a.m.
He still showed up at the plant for his shift, but with nothing to do, retreated to Good Time Charlie's, a bar neighboring the factory that advertised a Mexican dinner special on its Adams Street sign Tuesday.
"What's wrong with this country is that NAFTA thing," Strausbaugh said about an early 1990s trade agreement that eased imports flowing among Canada, Mexico and the United States.
He said politicians need to act.
"The only solution I can see is they shouldn't let companies go out of this country and make things to sell back here," Strausbaugh said. "If you're not working, are you going to buy anything? No."
Republican gubernatorial hopeful Mitch Daniels offered consolation for the Marion workers, but the state GOP chairman was more biting.
"Announcements like today's reinforce why our state needs new leadership," Jim Kittle said in a written statement. "We need a governor who knows how to help businesses grow and prosper in Indiana -- not a governor who sits idly by as more businesses close their doors."
Eric Miller, also seeking the GOP nomination for governor, said: "We can't write off manufacturing jobs. It just looks like too many leaders are writing them off."
He also said the way the layoffs were handled "raises some serious questions."
However, while it was unusual, a national expert on layoffs said the Thomson strategy was likely better for the workers in the long run.
John Challenger, head of one of the largest outplacement companies in the country, said forcing people to begin working on their future might be better than announcing a plant will close in a few months.
"I can't tell you how many people don't begin to look at a search seriously until they leave the plant," said Challenger, of Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago.
At the plant, such advice would have likely fallen on deaf ears.
"This was a bombshell. They gave us no notice whatsoever," said Paul Warner, 37, a Marion resident employed for 15 years at the plant.
Warner, who is divorced and just bought a three-bedroom house for himself, now isn't sure what he'll do.
"There aren't too many jobs out there today."
