Daylife/AP Photo
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Amid a sluggish national economy and angst in the American auto industry, Volkswagen is ramping up construction of its $1 billion assembly plant in Chattanooga.
Just days away from pouring the project’s first concrete, about 50 VW, Hamilton County and state officials stood on a gravel pad Wednesday at what will become the plant’s body shop, eyeing the Enterprise South site.
“Everything’s perfect,” said VW Plant Manager Frank Fischer.
While an official groundbreaking ceremony won’t take place until January, Mr. Fischer said the paint shop will be the first building to be constructed, and it will be larger than planned.
“We’re building it for 1,000 cars per day,” he said, adding the work is “coming along very well. We’re very happy about it.”
Despite a slowing American auto market, Mr. Fischer said VW’s board is dedicated to the Chattanooga project, which is to start vehicle production by 2011 and employ 2,000 people.
Maybe we can give VW some money for landscaping or something?
This award won’t do ’em any harm either.
I live in Michigan and can tell you in general, when unemployment goes up, it’s not that there aren’t jobs out there, it’s that people want the exact same job they had before and/or are unwilling to move. Just because you were making $100k a year and got laid off doesn’t mean you are worth $100k – you might have to go take a job for $80 or $70k in the interim – get over it.
Good! Bring on the TDI goodness!
Hopefully they’re non-union.
If you need any more proof that we “don’t need either FORD or GM” this is it.
#1 is entirely right.
yep non union shop. still making great pay.
#4
comhcinc said, yep non union shop. still making great pay.
What you are failing to understand, is in most cases, the reason your shop has kept your pay high, is because these companies are forced to compete with Union wages. Cut out the Unions, your pay and benefits will drop
guaranteed!
Unions have their place. Most workers benefit at their job one way or another from Union jobs. Work standards, benefits, etc.
Give us Hi mpg diesels!!! And maybe a cool, glass building to show off the newly made cars like in Wolfsburg?
#5 Higgy – right you are sir but adjustments need to be made on both sides of the table. The most difficult agreement to come to on both sides is how much is too much or what is enough.
What I’m saying is that greed has gotten us here and the opposite of that is needed to get us out. What is the opposite of greed anyway, moderation?, conservation?, altruism?. Whatever it is, it needs to be practiced from the CEOs to Unions.
#7
Agreed
I suspect laid off UAW workers’ resumes will end up in file 13.
Is it far from Nguyen?
#5
not really. there are not any union shops in the area. they don’t have to compete with the unions.
Idon’t have a problemwith the unions, as long asthey don’t have these benefits for retirees. New companies don’t have those costsand are at an advantage. We’re seeing the same things with the airlines.
Yeah! Chattanooga makes Dvorak!
30 years ago Chattanooga was a smog cloaked town which didn’t keep up with the times and we lost all our manufacturing jobs. We sucked. We made a plan (Vision 2000) and stuck to it…Now: We have tourism. We have incredible outdoor activities (100 miles of mtn biking withn 5 miles and nationally known road biking, literal Olympic white water, mtns of climbing), quality of life (affordable housing, miles and miles and miles of greenway, no crime)… all that plus a pro-business attitude. This is icing on the cake.
No, I don’t work for the Chamber of Commerce, we just love our little Dynamo of Dixie.
Tim
-in Chattanooga.
I use to belong to the Steelworkers Union. And it didn’t do one damn thing to protect my job. They were only interested in siphoning off their dues from my paycheck, and protecting their most senior members’ jobs. The union had basically conspired with plant management to write off the lowest tier of workers. And in spite of working for the company for 10 years, my job was still expendable at any whim of the company. I got temporarily laid off several times, to reduce their man-hour numbers for a quarter. And the union didn’t even defend my right to a vested pension. Only Uncle Sam did. And still I end up with only a fraction of its value. A legal compromise. In my opinion, it was the world’s most useless union to belong to. They were always in management’s hip pocket. And had zero balls about standing up against contract violations. And don’t get me started about arbitrators. They’d agree with management 95% of the time.
Unions got started in the US, a long time ago, when there were no laws about work place safety, and a 40 hour work week. And government just wasn’t interested in protecting the common man’s interests over big company’s. Well I’m not so sure government still doesn’t care. But their are more laws in place now, and more than one big employer in any state. So one has choices, that didn’t exist 100 years ago. So I’m thinking that most unions are left over mid 20th century baggage. And the main concern of most unions, is to protect the unions’ own existence. Not the most of the jobs of its members. If the UAW had any guts, it would have insisted on GM and Ford producing more economy car lines, than sticking with SUVs and MiniVans to the bitter end. But we didn’t hear them doing that, did we? What were they waiting for, a government bailout?
One ironic thing is that the plant site once was part of the Army Volunteer Ammunition Plant, which made bombs that probably were dropped on Volkswagen factories during WWII.
Toyota make full size trucks, making them the best “foreign” carmaker. But this is a plant dedicated to making personally owned vehicles so it’s all good. Honda just opened a new plant in Indiana too.
If you build the cars people want then you will be successful. Economics 101.
#15 WTF? Just like Lufthansa doesn’t fly Boeing jets because Boeing bombed the shit out of Germany. Or we don’t drive Mitsubishi’s because of the Mitsubishi… Zero airplanes that bombed Pearl Harbor.
#15- Retard.
It’s nice that even foreign makes employ local workers to assemble their cars. But I suspect that it’s a. mostly a PR move, and b. gets around certain import restrictions. The problem is that the parts are still mainly made overseas. And that even the domestic makes use a lot of parts made outside of the US. And yet they want a bailout. Before the big three gets any tax dollars, they should agree to switch to all domestic suppliers. Just like government defense contractors must do. Or else we’d just be helping Ford, GM, and Chrysler continue to make billions, using some foreign labor, over using all domestic labor.
US tax dollars shouldn’t go to propping up their failing businesses, that avoids employing any more US labor than they have to. Why was there no bailout of Tucker Motors? They made 50 of the safest, most stylish, most efficient cars of its time. And got screwed out of business because government politicians were out to protect the major makers from a new competitor.