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Holden To Cut 500 Jobs At Australian Manufacturing, Engineering Facilities

GM-Holden announced that it will be cutting 400 workers from its force at the Elizabeth plant outside of Adelaide, while another 100 jobs will be slashed from the engineering facility in Melbourne. The losses follow the slashing of 180 jobs in Elizabeth back in November of 2012, and another 40 jobs at the Port Melbourne engine plant last month. The most recent cutbacks take the Holden factory workforce down to 1,750 jobs, while engineering will shrink to 575 positions.

Perhaps what’s even more sobering is the fact that the announcement comes in just one week after Holden released figures that showed it had received $2.17 billion in government funding over the past 12 years, which equates to roughly twice as much as what Ford ($1.1 billion) and Toyota ($1.2 billion) received over the same time period, according to The Daily Telegraph. Holden states that the latest wave of cuts is due to due a drop in demand for its locally made Cruze, and a strong Australian dollar. In fact, Holden officials state that if the Australian dollar would lose 20 percent of its value, or if the U.S. dollar regained some of its might, domestic production would double because it would be able to affordably export its vehicles, such as the Australian-made Chevrolet SS. However, both currency scenarios seem highly unlikely at the time.

With the restructuring in its labor force, Holden plans to build 350 cars per day per eight-hour shift starting August 2013, a reduction from the 400 cars a day it currently builds at the same rate.

Former staff.

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Comments

  1. AUD has been at or above USD parity for nearly 2 1/2 years now. The Federal Reserve has been unashamed about its efforts to devalue the USD since 2009. Have GM’s economists been caught with their heads in the sand once again or is AUD/USD perhaps not the real reason for the lackluster sales??

    Reply
    1. I need an education. What should GM have done in Australia while this happened? GM was going through bankruptcy.

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      1. In 2009, when GM was going through bankruptcy, someone approved expenditures of 10’s of millions of dollars on export programs based on an obviously misguided fx assumption. SURPRISE! Just because the Aussie hung around 80 in the past does not have any impact on where it will go in the future. You don’t forecast using a rear-view mirror. VE is a great architecture in a globally shrinking segment. That has been the case since it was launched in 2006.

        Reply
  2. What is at stake here is not so much the Value vs. the dollar but the AUD vs. the Yen,

    A week Yen is killer on Holden right now and has really helped imports. If they are not careful the same could happen here. The dollar is not as strong here but the Yen is that week. Reports have GM and Ford recovery’s at risk if it get our hand.

    Reply
  3. Australian auto industry is tiny and any loss of jobs like this is significant.

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  4. Send Cruze hatches and wagons to US. That would help sales. Guess we could buy more police packaged cars. Slip me a Ute while they’re at it! (sarcasm)

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    1. Except, the Cruze wagon isn’t made here in Aus. It’s imported from South Korea. Maybe produce a huge demand for Commodore and Falcon-type vehicles (it’s mostly sedan and ute these days), along with demand for Caprice (not just as a cop car) and things might start to look up again. We have the best large-ish RWD cars available at a reasonable price in this country. For the price of a base model E-class Mercedes or 5-series BMW, you can get a V8 Calais or SS V or in the Mercedes’ case, a V8 Caprice V, have money left over, and pay less than half the Germans’ charge for servicing! I have a 2001 WHII Statesman LS1 which costs less to get serviced compared to my partners’ 2006 Kia Rio 1.6, with my last service being $335 (for a major) and her’s being over $500 (Statesman 280,000km compared to Rio’s 160,000km). The only real factors were I had to get a bit of trim replaced on the side of one of the seats and she had to get two new tyres put on, along with a new air filter (which I had to do myself as her lazy mechanic wouldn’t even try to get one, whereas I got one in five minutes from the local Repco)

      Reply
  5. most of the job losses is from the cruze, it lives in a cut throat part of the market where cars from asia and japan are getting cheaper to buy, last year 171k where inported from thailand, all manufacturing is suffering from the mining boom, only the mine operators are doing well.

    Reply

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