On Friday, July 11, at 3:30 p.m., second-shift workers at DTNA’s medium-duty truck manufacturing plant in Mount Holly, North Carolina were called into a “town hall” meeting with management. The workers, who are members of UAW Local 5285, were informed of the company’s plan to conduct a mass layoff. Second shift will be cut at the plant. This Friday is the last day before the plant goes from two shifts down to one.
The company will retain nearly a thousand workers at the plant while more than 500 will be laid off. Everyone with a seniority date of January 10, 2022 and afterwards is laid off. On top of this, a handful of workers are also being laid off at DTNA’s parts and logistics plant in Gastonia. Workers at this facility, who are members of UAW Local 5286, supply parts to the truck assembly plants in Mount Holly and Cleveland, North Carolina. According to the official notice filed by DTNA with the North Carolina Department of Commerce, the company plans to lay off a total of 573 employees at the two plants — a figure that also includes several dozen white-collar people and non-bargaining unit employees. Notably, the company has stated that the layoffs are temporary, but that they’ll last for “an unknown duration of time.”
The laid off workers at the Mount Holly plant will receive five weeks of lump-sum pay and six months of insurance. Additionally, laid off workers are being given the option to sign up to potentially be selected to work at DTNA’s Thomas Built Buses plant, which is located a full hour-and-a-half drive away in High Point. Since only a handful of workers are being laid off in Gastonia, the company is not providing these workers with severance pay since it’s not legally required to do so. If it wasn’t a violation of the WARN Act, then DTNA would undoubtedly be giving the same treatment to the Mount Holly workers.
The North Carolina job cuts at DTNA come as part of a broader layoff by the company of some 2,000 workers across five North American plants. In addition to the plants in Mount Holly and Gastonia, the other facilities impacted by the layoffs are the company’s Detroit Diesel complex outside of Detroit, Michigan and its truck manufacturing plants in Portland, Oregon and Saltillo, Mexico.
The Southern Workers Assembly, which includes UAW members that work at DTNA, stands in solidarity with the laid off workers and their families at the DTNA plants in Mount Holly and Gastonia. We also stand in solidarity with the laid off workers at DTNA’s plants in Portland, Detroit, and Saltillo. Stay strong and hang tough until you’re recalled to work once again, brothers and sisters! An injury to one is an injury to all!
Heavy-duty and medium-duty truck demand in the United States has been extremely weak for some time. According to the trade journal Transport Topics, Class 8 truck orders for June were down 36 percent compared to last year. The collapse in demand is due, in part, to economic uncertainty from Trump’s erratic “reciprocal” tariffs, which have led to a decline in truck shipment volumes and thus demand for new trucks. Also, Trump’s determination to roll back state and federal emission regulations for commercial trucks — which often encourage a rush of “pre-buy” sales — has further depressed market demand. There is, at the same time, a possibility that the Trump Administration could impose tariffs on all commercial truck imports. In April, the Trump Administration ordered the U.S. Commerce Department to conduct a probe into imports in this sector. This could set the stage for the imposition of “Section 232” tariffs for commercial truck imports.
In addition to the layoffs at DTNA, Volvo Trucks, another major manufacturer of commercial trucks, has announced layoffs of UAW members across its plants in the United States, including at plants operated by Volvo’s subsidiary company Mack Trucks. Meanwhile, PACCAR and Navistar (International) have cut jobs this year at their plants in Canada and Mexico, respectively. Notably, elsewhere in North Carolina, DTNA does not appear to have plans for layoffs at Thomas Built Buses or at the Cleveland Truck Manufacturing Plant.
For what it’s worth, workers in Mount Holly and Gastonia have been expecting and fearing this development for some time now. The Mount Holly plant has been on short hours for months. On a general level, the heavy truck manufacturing industry is cyclical and inclined to rapid swings between high levels and low levels of demand. In the past ten years, there were also major layoffs at DTNA’s North Carolina truck plants in 2016 and 2019. (A separate layoff took place at Thomas Built Buses in 2019, as well.) The company often ends up recalling many or most of the laid off workers as production demand picks up. Many veteran workers in Mount Holly and elsewhere have gone through multiple layoffs where they lost their job, were out for some period of time, and then were recalled.
This said, this is an extremely painful, frightening experience for the laid off workers and their families — and a difficult time for all workers employed at the impacted plants.
There’s also a strong element of corporate rapaciousness and capitalist exploitation at play in this situation. Last week, Daimler Truck’s top-level corporate bosses in Germany unveiled plans to provide a major payout to themselves and their rich shareholders in the form of a $2.34 billion stock buyback. In order to finance this, Daimler Truck is conducting widespread layoffs, not just in the United States, but also in Europe. Last week, the company announced its intent to cut 5,000 jobs in Germany over the next five years. Daimler is opening a Mercedes-Benz truck plant in Senegal, Africa, which will produce trucks for the European market. They are effectively throwing German workers on the scrap heap and shifting jobs to Senegal in order to exploit those workers at greater rates. All of this is intended to finance the company’s exorbitant stock buybacks and program for increased profitability. It thus appears that the situation that we’re facing in North Carolina is not nearly as bad as what our German brothers and sisters are facing. We also stand in solidarity with Daimler Truck’s German workers, who are members of the union IG Metal.
What can UAW members and working people take away from this experience?
As has always been apparent, the bosses do not care about us. All they care about is profit and maintaining their unjust system. They will employ us during the good times — and then kick us to the curb when it suits them.
In order to overcome this and win a better life for working people, workers need not only good collective bargaining agreements — like the kind that UAW at DTNA workers fought for during our monumental contract struggle last year. We also need to win political gains that benefit working people. To that end, UAW International president Shawn Fain has raised the call for unions across the country to align their collective bargaining contracts to expire on May 1, 2028 with the aim of waging a general strike on this date. Notably, the UAW at DTNA master agreement, which covers workers in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South, expires on March 3, 2028. This means that these workers will be able to participate in this movement.
The UAW must commit to preparing for this struggle and educating our members on the need for a general strike. We must also seek to bring into the movement broader layers of the working class, including workers from other unions and non-union workers, as well.
Among the political demands that workers can raise in 2028 is the demand for an end to mass layoffs and stock buybacks. As Les Leopold argues in his 2024 book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, stock buybacks should be illegal — just as they were prior to the early ‘80s, when they were legalized in the United States under the Reagan Administration. Before this, stock buybacks were considered to be illegal stock manipulation.
Instead of allowing corporations to funnel money to their undeserving, do-nothing shareholders, workers must fight for these resources to be used to provide a better, more stable life for all working people. Workers should not be made to live in constant fear of being thrown on the scrap heap as a result of corporate pilfering and unpredictable shifts in the economy over which we have no control. As opposed to permitting capital to siphon money to rich people through what amounts to stock market manipulation, we must also win investment to build up the productive capacity of society in an environmentally-sustainable way.
Workers have the power to win a better life for all if we stick together and fight for a program to advance our interests as a class. We must build the movement to wage this type of struggle in the coming period.
For now, workers and their families in Mount Holly, Gastonia, and beyond are in our thoughts and prayers. Hang in there, brothers and sisters!
