Company That Wanted Workers To Cut Pay In Half Drops Bid To Buy Indiana GM Plant

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/14219

Submitted by Doug Cunningham on September 28, 2010 - 4:58pm
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After failing to get workers to cut their pay nearly in half, a company that wanted to buy a GM plant in Indiana is no longer interested. Jesse Russell reports.

JD Norman Industries has dropped a bid for a Indianapolis General Motors plant after workers rejected concessions. The proposal from JD Norman would have kept the plant open, but it would have also come with a nearly 50 percent pay cut. Workers would have seen the base pay at the plant slashed from $29 per hour to $15.50 per hour. The plant currently employs 640 workers. The State of Indiana offered JD Nelson $2 million in tax incentives if it preserved those jobs and agreed to add an additional 1,200. Commerce Secretary Mitch Robb didn’t mince words in an interview with WTHR-TV. He said the workers have turned their backs on “future generations of people who might have had their jobs in Indiana.” UAW bargaining chairman Gregory Clark told the Indianapolis Star that the contract proposal “gutted everything” that the workers saw as a reasonable agreement between workers and employers. Many of the workers have the right to transfer to other factories if the plant closes, but that is dependent on GM finding room at other plants.

[LARED]

1. I must be missing somethnig

How could the State of Indiana believe providing 2 million dollars in tax incentives makes any sense when you are asking someone to add 1200 jobs to a plant that employs 640? What exactly would the 1200 do?