East Texas Business

By GREG JUNEK
Business Editor

Goodyear has announced to the United Steelworkers Union that it will lay off about 110 people — about two-thirds — of the workforce remaining at its Tyler plant between Aug. 6 and Aug. 19.

A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice sent to the union stated the “permanent mass layoff has been necessitated by a lack of work at the plant.”

Amy Brei, Goodyear spokeswoman, said about 60 employees will be left.

“There has been a decrease in the requirements needed for that rubber from Tyler,” Ms. Brei said of the Tyler plant, which retained its mixing operation after a mass layoff at the end of last year.

During the last contract negotiations between the company and the USW, the union struggled to keep the Tyler plant open, and the three-year master contract guaranteed the Tyler plant would be kept open through Dec. 31, 2007.

The company, however, ceased tire production there, reduced the plant’s employee base by several hundred and retained the plant as a rubber-mixing operation.

“I feel like this is a further reduction toward the total closure of the plant,” USW Local President Harold Sweat said Thursday.

The union’s master contract, which expires in July 2009, requires the company to shut down the Canadian Valleyfield plant before it closes the Tyler plant, Sweat said.

The Tyler Goodyear plant
(Staff file photo by Jaime R. Carrero)