#SpringHill

As its lineup of traditional luxury sedans struggles, sales of Cadillac’s 2017 XT5 show why automakers everywhere are scrambling to field as many crossovers as their budgets allow.

The XT5’s popularity and the level sales performance of the redesigned GMC Acadia prompted General Motors to add a third shift at its Spring Hill, Tennessee assembly plant. For Cadillac, it’s a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds.

Four General Motors assembly plants in the U.S. and Canada will be closed temporarily due to supply chain disruptions caused by last week’s earthquakes in Japan.

The automaker announced today that four plants — Spring Hill, Tennessee; Lordstown, Ohio; Fairfax, Kansas; and Oshawa, Ontario — will be idled for two weeks starting on April 25.

Over 40 workers at the General Motors facility in Spring Hill, Tenn. recently found themselves on a list of “scab workers” published by United Auto Workers Local 1853, a list one anonymous employee says kicked-off an effort to pressure and intimidate into joining.

As predicted, the hand-wringing over Sergio Marchionne’s letter to Bob King was not enough to derail the basic motivations for the UAW to reach new deals with the automakers. Last night the union agreed to a tentative agreement with GM, its pattern target for this, the first round of negotiations since the bailout. That agreement must be approved by the union rank-and-file, but if ratified, Reuters reports that it includes

• The re-opening of the idled Spring Hill, TN plant to build an unspecified “new product”
• $5,000 signing bonuses (at a cost to GM of $245m)
• According to the NYT, “significant improvements to health care benefits” are also part of the deal
• According to AN [sub], the union “successfully fought back efforts to make major changes — and weaken — our retirement plan.”

USA Today reports that Tennessee’s 2 Republican Senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander and GOP congresswoman Marsha Blackburn received a rather frosty reception when they went to Spring Hill on Friday to toast GM bringing jobs back to the Ex-Saturn plant. They got booed and heckled. Why the frosty reception? Well, if you remember, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker (along with the unnamed Congresswoman) were very vocal opponents against the bailout of GM and Chrysler. So, for 3 politicians to come back to their state and welcome back the very jobs which they would have been quite happy to see lost in the name of free market economics, probably stuck in the craw of the electorate. Namely, the UAW.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about rumors circulating that the Saturn plant at Spring Hill, Tennessee may be coming back online as GM’s volume increases. Well, the rumors are getting stronger.

When GM went into bankruptcy, people had their money on Saturn going to die. The odds changed a bit when Roger Penske was in talks to buy Saturn. But, in a cruel twist of fate, Saturn was condemned to death by a bunch of executives in France. They vetoed Carlos Ghosn’s idea of supplying Penske with Renault cars for the Saturn brand. The death of Saturn meant that its manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, would join Saturn in the grave. And so it did, along with 800 people who lost their jobs. Suddenly, there is the proverbial glimmer of hope for those 800 workers and the economy of Spring Hill.