Plant closure

[cn nutbar]

Sad news for London Ontario.Caterpillar Inc. has decided to permanently close the Electro Motive plant which will mean the loss of 450 at the plant and over 1200 related jobs in the community.With a population just over 352,000,this is a big loss for the city.The plant has been operational since 1950 when it started building EMD F units and Geeps (GP 7's)---it has become a world class manufacturer of diesel locomotives,the latest being the SD 80 and 90 MAC series.

[Steamtrains]

That's bad news...And not just for the people and the town directly affected, but a sign of things to come for the RR'ing industry.... :cry:

[Prairie Trains]

Hope all those unemployed workers remember to thank their union for such a well done good job they did for them. I saw this on the news in early Jan. and said I bet that the plant would never reopen. I wonder if the union wasn't being told what to do by their US counter part? Just jobs going back to the job starved US. Greed gets you nowhere, saw one of these workers on TV saying how he just had to take his kids to Florida every year. I wish I could have done that just once in my lifetime, let alone every year. I feel sorry for the families, but I think the workers have no one to blame but themselves and there union. Times are tough every where, and the investors have to get their huge profits regardless of the cost!

[cn nutbar]

Here's a couple of locomotives that were built at the plant during the early days in the 1950's--- a Canadian National F-3 and a TH&B GP-7

[MountainMan]

A sad day. I fear that someday railroad tracks will be as meaningless to people as dinosaur tracks.

[alpha_1]

London will survive. Good to see the union busted!

[sailormatlac]

It was an inevitable loss under such conditions...

It's crazy how manufactures close at an accelerated pace in Canada since Christmas. In my area, six plants closed down and some large ones... Feels like the recession is finally hitting us after a long delay.

Matt

[Roger Hensley]

London's lose is Muncie Indiana's gain.

[railohio]

That's bad news...And not just for the people and the town directly affected, but a sign of things to come for the RR'ing industry.... :cry:

A sad day. I fear that someday railroad tracks will be as meaningless to people as dinosaur tracks.

Just to be clear, this isn't the end of railroading or a sign of another massive recession. The original poster failed to mention that EMD/Cat is moving the operation to Indiana and is not shutting down.

[Brakie]

London will survive. Good to see the union busted!

I have worked union and lived better then I did working nonunion where your job depended on the whim of the company..

One local nonunion shop found reasons to fire all their full time plant and office employees and hire "part time" employees so they could save on holiday pay and vacation pay-oh,the upper management got fat raises with fat bonus.

Today they are begging for help at minimum wage with zero benefits.

As we say they made their bed now let them find quality workers at minimum wage.

I don't think anybody(other then upper management) will shed a tear if that shop closed forever.

[MountainMan]

Just to be clear, this isn't the end of railroading or a sign of another massive recession. The original poster failed to mention that EMD/Cat is moving the operation to Indiana and is not shutting down.[/quote]

The trains rarely come to Canon City any more, and countless miles of track lie rusting and abandoned, choked with abandoned rolling stock by the hundreds, throughout my Colorado. The rail-served industries in this part of Colorado have gone away, and the last one in Canon City - the coal-fired power plant - is scheduled for closure when the distant plant near Pueblo comes on line. After that, except for the short stretch owned by the Royal Gorge Tourist Railroad, no one will any use for all of that abandoned track that goes NW clear up to Leadville and clear east to Pueblo to join the UP trackage southbound.

Most of the people in Canon City and Florance don't even know the history of their railroads, or where the tracks that are everywhere underfoot used to go...or still go.

I'm witnessing the passing of an era.

[radivil]

I have worked union and lived better then I did working nonunion where your job depended on the whim of the company..

Some of us prefer being on our own instead of shackled to the dead weight of a lot incompetent coworkers.

Their whim is my benefit.

[Brakie]

I have worked union and lived better then I did working nonunion where your job depended on the whim of the company..

Some of us prefer being on our own instead of shackled to the dead weight of a lot incompetent coworkers.

Their whim is my benefit.

Perhaps but,you should talk to some of those folks that served that company for 20-30 years and was shown the door so the company could fatten their pockets on minimum wage workers with no benefits that can be fired for any reason.They have a big employee turnover-most quit within 60 days and move on to better paying jobs..

Some of those long time employee lost their homes and was to old to start fresh.

How does one justify corporate greed?

Nobody will miss that company if it closed tomorrow.

[Russ Bellinis]

I have worked union and lived better then I did working nonunion where your job depended on the whim of the company..

[/quote]Perhaps but,you should talk to some of those folks that served that company for 20-30 years and was shown the door so the company could fatten their pockets on minimum wage workers with no benefits that can be fired for any reason.They have a big employee turnover-most quit within 60 days and move on to better paying jobs..

Some of those long time employee lost their homes and was to old to start fresh.

How does one justify corporate greed?

Nobody will miss that company if it closed tomorrow.[/quote]

There is another side to that sort of corporate attitude as well Larry. Before I retired I worked for a dealer for a transport refrigeration company. They closed a union pant in Southern California, and built a new non-union plant in another part of the country. The savings in wages in that "right to work" state wasn't enough to suit them, so they also only hire temporary workers at close to if not minimum wage and no benefits. They even hire many of their engineers by the job. I can tell you that their new system made a lot of work for me and the rest of the techs at the dealership, because the quality done by temporary non-skilled workers is non existent. Typically we would find cold solder joints all over the piping, or leaks where the solder didn't fill in all the way around the joint. We would have a problem with some newly designed electronic component and call for technical assistance only to be told, the engineer who designed that piece left once the design was complete and no one has any idea how it works! I am thankful that I am retired and that my pension comes from the Union pension fund and is no longer from company funds.

I think in the case of Caterpiller-Emd that the Muncie shop is probably a union shop. As far as railroads disappearing-only from states that don't have the industry to support railroads.

[Mike Kieran]

I have seen a lot of unnecessary union bashing going on lately and it really surprises me that in this day and age of unlimited information, people can make such blanket statements without researching their claims. It's not unions shutting down businesses, It's the greed of people who want to make a 500% profit versus a 100% profit.

If it wasn't for the union/labor movement, we would still be working 6 days per week at 12 hours per day. There would still be child labor in the factories and dangerous working conditions. It wasn't unions embezzling billions of dollars and it wasn't unions shutting down businesses. Many businesses ship production overseas because they can pay for one day what a worker makes in one hour. A big reason for the need for cheap labor is because retailers will only pay so much for a product forcing the jobs overseas. The cost savings is very rarely passed on to the consumer. As a result, quality goes down.

A case in point is when Snapper Lawnmower went to the Walmart Headquarters in Benton, Arkansas. The prices that Walmart would have paid to Snapper would have forced production overseas. Snapper refused to sell at Walmart because they felt that production overseas would have caused a drop in the quality in their product.

This country made the best products for years and lead the world in industrial infrastructure. Do the unions design the product or the assembly line? I remember when you bought a car and you could do most of the repairs yourself. The car was expected to last 20 years. Nowaday's cars are not expected to last more than 10 years.