GM plant helped Tinker grow
OKC area was ‘lucky’ how closure played out here
After a heralded rebirth of a “new General Motors,” the company is once again closing plants and laying off thousands of employees.
This time the cuts involve five plants and up to 15,000 jobs.
Memories of the Oklahoma City General Motors plant at 7447 SE 74 have faded for many. But it's still something remembered by former labor relations manager Clyde Stevens a dozen years after he was surprised to learn one Monday morning he and his 2,200 co-workers were among 30,000 who lost their jobs with the closing of nine plants in 2005.
Sometimes workers wondered whether a controversy that arose over tax rebates given to the plant, along with a strike in the mid-1990s, might have created resentment back in Detroit. But the plant, which opened in 1979, was performing well, Stevens said.
The workers thought their jobs were safe. The company rebuilt the paint shop three years earlier when it took a direct hit from a tornado. The plant had shifted from production of sedans to the more popular SUVs.
“We had no idea it was coming,” Stevens recalled this week. “Executives came in on a Sunday night, there were very few who knew and they made the announcement Monday morning. They put out word we would have a meeting in a big area of the plant. I was called out of the shower at YMCA and told to come in early.”
Some, like Stevens, took on a second job, others retired, but the younger workers were among those hit the hardest.
“A lot of people ended up in second careers, but not making the money we did at GM,” Stevens said. “We were making $20 an hour at that time. When they had to go out on the open market, it was shell shock.”
Plant transferred to Tinker
Stevens remained employed at the closed plant until 2008 when a county bond issue passed by voters transferred the plant to Tinker Air Force Base for needed expansion.
The redevelopment was a win for Oklahoma County, Oklahoma City and the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber.
“I was there when we turned over the building to Oklahoma County,” Stevens said. “Personally, it felt better. A lot of people were devastated. But in terms of it being turned over to be Tinker, we were familiar with a lot of GM locations being bulldozed. So at least we knew it was going to a good use.”
The plant is once again filled, now with workers overhauling jet engines and aircraft, though Stevens only knows of a few former GM workers that went through training and ended up working at the plant after it reopened.
Roy Williams, president of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, looks back at the GM plant closing as one that was a hardship on the laid-off workers but did not do any significant damage to the city’s economy, which today is at virtual full employment.
“If you look back, and we did this, when it happened, all of that, it was a small blip on the radar screen,” Williams said. “The facility had been scaling back and reducing employees. If you look back at an economic chart, you can’t see when that happened because it coincided with other things that were going on.”
Williams notes many of the plants closed in 2005 and the ones slated to close are surrounded with suppliers.
“We didn’t have that many suppliers,” Williams said. “The jobs we lost were the jobs we lost. In a lot of other places, the supplier list had more employees than the plant. In other communities, it’s devastating. Here it hurt, but not like it did in other places.”
Williams calls Oklahoma City “lucky” in how the plant closing coincided with the need for additional, more modern space at Tinker and how the plant had been built on what was surplus land acquired when the base was first built during World War II.
“If that GM plant had been out in the middle of nowhere, it would have been a different story,” Williams said. “With Tinker, we had opportunities.”
The silver lining of the plant closing, Williams said, is that it resulted in Tinker ending up with a three-star general and top ranking as a sustainment center while two others were dropped from twostar to one-star status.
“It was huge for Tinker,” Williams said. “It created a restructuring with the Air Force. It created a new lens for the Air Force to look through at Tinker ... before we were one of three pieces, now we are the big dogs. And the GM plant was the catalyst for all that happening.”