Nissan Plant Closure a Blow to City’s Future : Autos: Zama, Japan, is strongly dependent on the auto maker. Layoffs are new to a society accustomed to being taken care of by big companies.
Driving down this town’s busiest stretch of road, the word Nissan is everywhere. There is the Nissan Showroom, Nissan Service Center, Kanagawa Nissan Parking.
Even wooden crates piled outside a ramshackle machinists shop have Nissan stenciled across their sides in big, black letters.
To tens of thousands of people in this city just south of Tokyo, Nissan has meant money, jobs and security--until now.
Thirty years and more than 10 million cars since the auto maker decided to build a factory in Zama, it has announced that the plant will close.
Hit by what it is calling the worst recession for the industry since the 1950s, Japan’s second-largest car maker last week announced plans to transfer car production from Zama to a newer, more efficient factory halfway across the country.
Nissan also said it will eliminate 5,000 jobs from its 53,000-worker force through attrition and reduced hiring over the next three years--adding its name to a growing list of Japanese companies forced by lean times to cut back.
Though the announcement meant the first closure of a domestic auto plant in years, it wasn’t entirely out of the blue. Nissan executives had already said they wanted to slice some of the fat out of the production process, and the costly Zama plant was a logical target.
The end of auto production will directly affect 2,500 of Nissan’s 4,000 Zama workers over the next two years, who are to be transferred to other facilities. Company officials say some work at the plant will continue, but have not disclosed details.
To many workers, the news was a shock. Big Japanese companies traditionally have guaranteed lifetime employment for workers, but the recession has strained--and sometimes broken--those paternalistic ties.
At the end of a shift one recent evening, tight-lipped workers briskly passed by TV crews and reporters covering what has become a major story in Japan. The few who did stop refused to give their names.
“Maybe if this was happening at a second- or third-rate company it would make sense,” said one assembly line worker. “I’ve never worked anywhere else. I’m 49 years old and I’ve worked here for 25 years. I never dreamed this would happen.”
The worker said he blames his uncertain future not only on Nissan, which he thinks has overextended itself, but also on the United States for what he called “unfair political pressure.”
“Competition should be what decides things,” he said. “If we weren’t forced to have voluntary export quotas and to worry about local content, we wouldn’t have to build factories in America, and we could have more jobs here.”
Also facing profound change are the legions of subcontractors and local businesses--from restaurants to bars to grocery stores--that rely on the factory for their customers.
“That factory is one of the foundations upon which Zama is built,” said Keiji Yoshikawa, head of the planning department at City Hall.
Yoshikawa said Nissan accounted for about 20% of the corporate taxes collected by the city of 100,000 last year.
Nissan has been particularly hard hit by the recession because it depends more heavily than other Japanese auto makers on the domestic market, which has deteriorated the most rapidly.
Nissan in November reported the first net loss for the parent company since Nissan stocks were publicly listed in 1951. Last week, officials forecast a pretax loss of nearly $130 million this fiscal year.
