Chrysler Group will this week announce it is hiring over 1,600 workers for its Belvidere, Illinois assembly plant, signaling, a media report said, “the start of a hiring blitz that promises to add thousands of workers to the automaker’s plants over the next three years”.
Chief executive Sergio Marchionne is expected to make the announcement during a visit to the auto maker’s plant on Thursday (2 February), according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The plant will manufacture the new 2013 Dodge Dart – replacing the Caliber – alongside the Jeep Compass and Patriot which are being updated for the 2013 model year.
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The additional workers start in July and hiring has already begun, the sources told the WSJ. Workers will be paid the automaker’s new hire rate of US$15.78 an hour.
Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson declined to comment to the WSJ.
Chrysler last week issued an open invitation to media to an event at Belvidere on Thursday saying: “Chrysler Group LLC chairman and CEO Sergio Marchionne and Illinois governor Pat Quinn will join other federal, state and local officials, UAW representatives and company employees to celebrate recent announcements at the Belvidere Assembly Plant and dedicate the new body shop.”
The WSJ said the Belvidere job expansion will be the first in a series of new hiring announcements that the automaker is expected to make to meet growing demand for its cars and trucks. These jobs are in addition to hiring planned for its Jefferson North plant in Detroit and a Toledo, Ohio, assembly complex.
“We have to put in more than one shift in a variety of plants,” Marchionne said during an interview with the Wall Street Journal late last year. “If we’re going to move up to producing 2.4m cars, I need to make them somewhere. I mean I can’t do it with the existing shift pattern. It’s not as if I’m turning on more plants. I don’t have any.”
According to the WSJ report, Marchionne’s plan for Chrysler ultimately has the automaker producing about 2.8mn new cars and trucks in 2014, outstripping the company’s current manufacturing capacity. Chrysler has room to add workers at the Toledo complex along with factories in Sterling Heights and Warren, Michigan, and Brampton, Ontario, in Canada.
To keep costs in check, Chrysler intends to introduce a new working schedule known as ‘3-2-120’. Under the system, three crews of employees on two shifts work four 10-hour days, or 120 hours, the WSJ said.
“The benefit to the company is that we can run the plant more hours without the use of overtime, and for the employees, they will now get more days during the year,” Tinson said.
Chrysler adds 1,100-job third shift at Jefferson North
