On The Shop Floor At Delphi

I wrote a piece a few days ago about the bankruptcy at Delphi. Corp. This is an excerpt from Delphi employee Todd Jordan about what it was like on shop floor the day after the bankruptcy announcement was made:

By the end of his [the supervior's] rambling and distribution of company propaganda and how he is concerned with my future. He finishes by encouraging us to work hard as if nothing is going on. He offers up the one piece of information even worth a shit. He tells us our department has jumped from 3,600 parts a day to 5,000. Back in June before Miller came into the picture and before talk of bankruptcy we had been doing 3,000 parts a day. Soon as the word bankruptcy started getting thrown around and Miller was in place that number went to 3,600 the next day. Now, the day after bankruptcy it is 5,000. He assures us upon being asked that the parts will go directly into GM vehicles, but we know better. They have been building an inventory buffer for months not just in Kokomo, but all Delphi plants. These parts are not going into vehicles; they will be used to counter a possible strike.

The most ironic part of all of this is we haven’t been able to build even the original 3,000 parts. We are so short on people due to retirees not getting replaced we barely have enough to run. Half the machines are not even ran on second shift and only ¼ of them are run on midnights. Just in September alone we had nearly 120 people retire from Delphi Kokomo. Nobody has been replaced in our plant since shortly after the 1999 spin-off. That’s 6 years of people retiring who have not been replaced. What we have seen is dozens of departments shutdown and sent overseas. We have thousands of empty square feet in our facility. Football field sized areas with crated up machines or just empty space.