By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Herald Bulletin
Delphi Corp. officials visited Anderson’s Plant 20 on Tuesday, giving nervous workers some face time but few answers.
President Rodney O’Neal and Vice President of the Automotive Holdings Group Jim Burtrand opened the floor to questions at around 4 p.m.
Whether the Anderson plant will survive the bankruptcy reorganization, Delphi winder Janie Fuller said, is still, “to be determined.”
“I don’t think this place is going to be here,” she said. “I hate to see it — our blood, sweat and tears built this place and now they’re taking it away.”
O’Neal did sound a positive note on salaries. Instead of the $9 an hour the company had said it would like to cut wages to, O’Neal said it may be more like $20.
The visit was a follow-up to a lean manufacturing workshop held at the plant, part of a continuing effort to boost profitability by improving the manufacturing flow.
“We need more information. Employees need to know what’s going on,” production operator James Burgess, who also serves as president of the Madison County NAACP, said. “Me as an employee, I looked at it like, I’m going to listen to what they have to say.”
The plant is part of Delphi’s “troubled profitability” holding group, Delphi spokesman Brad Jackson said.
As part of the follow-up tour, the two officials took questions from the workers.
Some workers attacked the million-dollar signing bonuses O’Neal and other top brass got as the company asked rank-and-file workers to take a pay cut.
O’Neal, Burgess said, responded by saying, “If you took our salary away, that wouldn’t change the position that Delphi is in.”
As for himself, Burgess said he didn’t get a satisfactory answer to his own concerns about a bankruptcy judge getting the power to invalidate benefits gained through collective bargaining.
“Why would we allow the largest supplier in the world to be a trendsetter for breaking promises?” he said. “The courts should not trump collective bargaining.”
“I just don’t go along with their way of thinking,” Fuller said. “They want to make it look like moonlight and roses.”
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