The Cummins Rocky Mount Engine plant in North Carolina this week laid off nearly 400 employees.
The company cut 180 permanent full-time employees and 210 temporary full-time employees because of sagging engine sales, said Mark Land, a spokesman for Indiana-based Cummins Inc.
“Given the state of the economy, we’ve seen demand for all of our products fall significantly in the last three or four months,” Land told Soundings Trade Only this morning. “Cutting people is the last thing we do. We take a lot of other steps first to reduce costs.”
The company has cut 1,500 salaried workers worldwide, about 2,500 hourly workers and about 2,700 temporary workers since last October, Land said.
“Virtually every manufacturing facility we’ve got in the U.S. has had some sort of cut,” he said. Columbus, Ind.-based Cummins has more than a dozen plants around the country.
The segment of the company that deals with recreational marine has been hit hard by the recession, he said.
“Recreational marine has been suffering, well before the rest of the economy,” Long said. “That segment was the first segment to really get hit. Anything to do with consumer markets for us was the first to get hit. That’s recreational marine, pickup trucks, RVs — they were hit first, and they were hit very, very hard.”
— Beth Rosenberg
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