Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410040009
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
By next year, the company says it will be making 72 trucks in an eight-hour day, and further expansion will eventually allow it to roll out 110 WhiteGMC model tractors every day.
With the truck manufacturing industry in the midst of its biggest boom year ever, Volvo GM's Dublin plant alone will manufacture 16,000-plus trucks this year. That's a far cry from the 2,332 trucks the plant produced in 1976, its first full year of production.
White Motor Co., a Cleveland-based company that had been making trucks since the turn of the century, broke ground for the original plant in Dublin in 1973.
In the summer of 1975, the first trucks rolled out of the plant; 277 were produced that year, 2,332 were made the next, and 5,477 in 1977.
But by the turn of the decade, the company was reeling. With the industry in the middle of its most pronounced downturn of the previous 18 years, workers were unsure from one week to the next if they would get paid. Bankruptcy loomed.
"That was a nerve-racking time," recalled Sherman Blankenship, a longtime worker at the plant and now the president of United Auto Workers Local 2069. "Everything was on the fence."
But in 1981, AB Volvo came to Southwest Virginia and the Swedish auto, truck and bus manufacturer bought out White. With Germany's Daimler-Benz - the world's largest truck maker - purchasing Portland, Ore.-based Freightliner at about the same time, Volvo was trying to keep pace.
In the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan pushed deregulation of the freight industry, the truck manufacturing industry reorganized. "The guys in the middle didn't make it because their overhead was too big," said Roger Johansson, vice president for marketing. The big guys got bigger; the smaller companies got swallowed.
So it was that in 1987, General Motors bought a 17 percent interest in Volvo White Truck Corp.
"Both companies were looking for synergies," said William Walther, Volvo GM's director of corporate affairs. General Motors, whose heavy truck business was a fraction of its medium- and light-truck business, was looking for an investment inroad. Volvo-White was looking for more dealers and more customers. The following year, the company changed its name to Volvo GM Heavy Truck Corp.
In 1988, nearly 150,000 Class 8 trucks were sold in the United States, the second consecutive year sales had risen. But the following year, the cyclical truck industry took its turn, and by 1991 sales had bottomed out at about 99,000, the smallest number in eight years.
For Volvo GM, the pain of a depressed economy was as outwardly obvious then as signs of good times are now. In 1990, the company laid off 350 workers - about a third of its work force. Production of trucks was cut from 60 a day to 36. In the summer of 1991, Volvo GM would close its plant in Ogden, Utah, and move most of that plant's work to its Orrville, Ohio, operation.
Before the strike, many workers recalled, communication between labor and management was almost non-existent. Workers thought management wouldn't listen.
"When we was out on strike, you just couldn't talk with the company," recalled Lawrence Thompson, a gruff, 18-year veteran of the plant. He maintains that forming the union back in the late '70s was the best thing that ever happened.
But after the strike, "management ... spilled over to the floor," said Lloyd Saunders, an assembler on the engine line who's worked at Volvo GM 11 years. Now he can talk to managers, offer suggestions, and know he'll be listened to. "I know personally I have more input."
If one person forged ties of cooperation between labor and management, it would be Frank Adams, now executive vice president for industrial operations at the corporate headquarters in Greensboro, N.C.
Adams began his career at White Motor Co., and was kept on when Volvo took over. He was materials manager at the Dublin plant until 1985, when he went to Greensboro to become purchasing director. When the Dublin plant's then-manager left in the middle of the strike to take another job in England, Adams was sent back to Dublin as plant manager.
Now executive vice president for industrial operations back in the corporate headquarters, Adams said the idea behind his approach to revamping the lines of communication at the plant is a simple one.
"Our most important assets are our people," he said, echoing a statement made by the union head. "We need the minds of all our people working to solve our problems rather than just the minds of 10-15 managers.
"That's my style."
His style and success even earned him a shot at the presidency of Volvo GM, which he headed temporarily earlier this year. While he wasn't named to the top job permanently, a company spokesman said he will be one of four or five in the running the next time the job comes open, and he still has the respect of his former workers in Dublin.
"We were hoping Frank would be the president," said Blankenship, the union president. "That was a disappointment."
"Frank - he's the man who turned this company around," said Thompson. "He's a friend to everyone on the floor."
by CNB