GM Closing in Ohio May Benefit Van Nuys Plant

General Motors said on Tuesday that it will permanently shut down its assembly plant in Norwood, Ohio, at the end of August, a full year ahead of schedule, because the Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds it makes are not selling well enough.

Although the news is devastating to Norwood, it bodes well for laid-off second-shift workers from the rival Van Nuys plant, the only other factory that makes Camaros and Firebirds.

GM is not promising when it might bring back the 2,190 laid-off Van Nuys workers, who were sent home indefinitely last July. Darwin E. Allen, a GM spokesman in Detroit, said it is “doubtful” the second shift will be called back before Norwood closes.

He said that the San Fernando Valley plant will “make preparations for their return, but it really depends on what the market’s doing.”

Thus far, 1987 Camaros and Firebirds have been selling poorly. GM indicated that it has more than a 100-day supply of both models and a 70-day supply is considered normal for this time of year.

Workers in Norwood, a Rust Belt city of 26,000 surrounded by Cincinnati, listened to the afternoon announcement at the plant in stunned silence, a city official there said.

Richard Dettmer, Norwood’s community development director, said city leaders are wondering how they will make ends meet in their operating budget. Norwood is a classic one-company town, and that company is GM.

“We’d been led to believe GM’s approach would be, well, at least somewhat sensitive to the people here,” Dettmer said. “They just said, ‘Whoops,’ and pulled the carpet out from under us.”

The nation’s largest auto maker said in November that it would close the Norwood plant by the middle of next year, and 10 others in the Midwest by 1989. Eventually, the move will put 29,000 people out of work. The Norwood plant employs 4,000.

That decision also spared, at least for a few years, the long-endangered Van Nuys plant.

GM has said consistently that the Van Nuys plant operates with a shipping cost disadvantage. Its distance from Midwestern suppliers and the majority of customers makes a car produced in Van Nuys cost GM an average of $400 more than one made in Norwood.

But GM officials said Norwood, not Van Nuys, was getting the ax because the 63-year-old burnt-orange brick building is aging, and because it is multistoried--which was better suited to producing 1920s-vintage Chevrolet Superiors than today’s sporty Camaros and Firebirds.

In addition, the Norwood plant suffers from absenteeism, low productivity and sloppy quality control, GM has said. The average Norwood car requires eight warranty visits to the repair shop, which GM says is much higher than average.

Plant officials in Van Nuys are in the process of implementing sweeping changes to improve efficiency with Japanese-style management techniques, such as clustering workers in small teams.