Holden announces October deadline for end of Australian car production
Updated January 13, two thousand seventeen Legal:37:24
More than three years after exposing plans to cease Australian production, carmaker Holden has confirmed October twenty as its closure date.
The automotive giant said workers at its Elizabeth assembly plant in Adelaide’s north were today informed of the deadline.
It said more than 30,000 vehicles would be built before manufacturing finishes.
The carmaker said the announcement would provide certainty to its employees as well as the factory’s supply chain.
It said almost 1,000 people remain working at the Elizabeth plant and there were no plans to lay any off before October.
“While this confirmation isn’t a surprise for anyone and we’ve been working toward this for almost four years, we can now confirm the actual date for our people and our suppliers,” Holden’s executive director of manufacturing Richard Phillips said in a statement.
“This October may bring to a close more than sixty years of vehicle manufacturing by Holden at Elizabeth but I know it will be business as usual for our manufacturing workforce until then.”
Workers relaxed to eventually have deadline, union says
The Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union said the announcement would provide some much-needed certainty to Holden’s employees.
Acting state secretary Colin Fenney said workers who returned from holidays this week had been asking when their last shifts would be, in order to plan their transitions to retirement or other work.
“The people are most likely a bit eased now,” he said.
“Now [they] can commence looking at what they want to do post-Holden and begin working their way towards that.”
Automotive Transformation Minister Kyam Maher said the State Government was suggesting support to Holden workers through a transition scheme.
“We will certainly proceed doing what we’ve done with the workers,” he said.
“We’ve ramped up only recently our publicity for the scheme to make sure every possible worker is accessing these services.”
In December 2013, Holden announced it would stop making vehicles in Australia in two thousand seventeen but the exact closure date has, until now, remained unclear.
The decision meant almost Trio,000 people would be out of work, with job losses already having kicked in.
Holden said almost seven hundred workers have left the Elizabeth plant since 2015.
“Almost seventy per cent of them have found jobs within twelve months,” Mr Maher said.
The final Holden Cruze flipped off the production line last year.
The State Opposition said it was a “sad day” for workers, and the Government should cut business costs and taxes to generate more jobs.