TUSCALOOSA, AL—Mercedes-Benz US-International is in violation of federal labor law for prohibiting employees from organizing inside its assembly plant here when they are off the clock, an appeals court ruled on Monday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a 2014 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that Mercedes employees are free to solicit other employees to join the UAW Local 112 on the plant site.
BELVIDERE, IL—Yanfeng Automotive is building a new assembly plant here to make cockpit components for the Jeep Cherokee. The factory is expected to create 400 new jobs.
MARION, OH—When you arrive at the largest clothes-dryer plant in the world, the first thing you see is not some whiz-bang new product, but a really old one. Inside the visitor entrance is a dryer made when the plant had just opened in 1955. The appliance was used in someone’s house for 60 years and still works.
STERLING HEIGHTS, MI—FCA US LLC won a $4.6 million grant to hire 700 employees at its assembly plant here as it prepares to build the next generation of the Ram 1500 pickup. The automaker began a $1.5 billion project to retool the facility in July.
WASHINGTON—Labor regulations implemented during the Obama administration could cost an estimated $81 billion over the next 10 years and require more than 400 million hours in paperwork, according to a new study from the National Association of Manufacturers’ Center for Manufacturing Research.
BROUGHTON, UK—Like a cartoon space alien with a dome-like skull, an Airbus Beluga transport plane arriving from Madrid drops from the sky above this village 200 miles northwest of London and taxis to a stop with its front end tucked inside a large building off the runway. Its bulbous forehead pops open to disgorge massive wing panels—98 feet long and 20 feet wide—that will soon be assembled by sophisticated robots and about 800 people into the largest carbon-fiber composite wings now built for commercial aviation.
OSHAWA, ON—Canadian auto workers union Unifor has a tentative contract agreement with General Motors Co. that not only breathes new life into the at-risk Oshawa Assembly Plant east of Toronto, but signifies a testament to the importance of the automotive industry across Canada.
PETROLIA, CA—Victor Scheinman, the Stanford engineering professor whose electrically powered, computer-controlled robot would become the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly (PUMA) robot, has died at age 73.
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