General Motors Will Lay Off Some Workers at Its Saturn Plant in Delaware

NEWPORT, Del. April 17, 2003; The AP reports that General Motors Corp. will lay off some workers at its Saturn plant in Delaware indefinitely following a four-week shutdown that starts in May, company officials said.

About 1,400 of the 2,100 workers at the Newport assembly plant will be temporarily laid off between May 12 and June 6.

Some of those hourly workers will not return after June 6 because the plant is going to scale back production. GM officials declined to say how many workers would be affected by the job cuts.

"We don't know what the impact is going to be manpower-wise, but there will be some layoffs based on the fact that we are going to slow the assembly line down," Dan Flores, a GM spokesman, said Thursday.

The plant produces about 57 cars an hour, said David J. Myers, president of United Auto Workers Local 435 at the Saturn plant. After June 6, it will reduce production to 32.7 cars an hour, he said.

Myers said many workers, who were notified Wednesday of the layoffs, were not surprised.

Sales of the midsize L-Series have been declining from a peak in 2001 due to increased competition from other midsize cars. Last year, L-Series sales dropped to 81,172, down 17 percent from 2001. Saturn Corp., a division of Detroit-based General Motors, had hoped to sell as many as 200,000 a year when it introduced the L-Series in 1999.

GM plans to stop making the L-Series in 2005. Company officials have not said whether the Newport plant -- the sole U.S. L-Series assembly plant -- will produce a new Saturn model after the L-Series.