The Roanoke Times } File 2006

Volvo said U.S. retail sales of the kind of truck the Pulaski County plant produces fell nearly 12 percent in 2008.

Associated Press | File 2008

Goodyear will close its Radford plant, which currently employs 18 people.

The Roanoke Times | File 1999

Corning will reduce its nationwide work force by some 13 percent.

Randy Collins, a truck assembly worker at Volvo Trucks North America, said the mood in the factory near Dublin was grim Tuesday after word came down that 650 workers will be laid off.

"They knew that it was coming. The number was a shock," Collins said.

The declining economy also hit home at two other New River Valley manufacturing operations.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. announced it will close its Radford plant on Friday, costing 18 workers their jobs.

And Corning Inc., a New York corporation with a plant in Christiansburg, announced it will lay off 13 percent of its work force, or 3,500 employees, by the end of the year. It is unclear how many, if any, of those layoffs will be from the Montgomery County facility.

Volvo's action is not a surprise because the heavy-duty truck business is running on fumes. U.S. sales of heavy trucks made by all manufacturers fell in 2008 for the second consecutive year, reaching the lowest level since 1992, Today'sTrucking.Com reported Tuesday, quoting data from Ward's Automotive.

U.S. retail sales of class 8 trucks, the kind Volvo's Pulaski County plant makes, fell nearly 12 percent in 2008 to 133,473 vehicles, the site said.

"We are reducing our production capacity in alignment with declining demand," Volvo spokesman Jim McNamara said. "These layoffs are considered permanent."

Lester Hancock, president of United Auto Workers Local 2069, was in the union office inside the factory Tuesday afternoon. He said the job announcement "should wake up a lot of American people to be really, really serious about how bad the American economy is."

McNamara said 650 employees, or 40 percent of the remaining work force, "will be laid off in March and April." Hancock and Collins said the Swedish truckmaker intends to gear down production from 77 to 50 trucks a weekday and go forward with a portion of the planned 650 layoffs March 27. Depending on circumstances, it may cut deeper if needed in April, they said.

Jobs will be cut based on seniority. Collins, an assembly worker with 15 years of seniority, said he thinks he'll lose his job if Volvo lets all 650 go. He said the plant's white-collar work force should be proportionately reduced but hasn't been.

The plant, which employed 3,225 people after the announcement of expansion plans in 1999, could fall to fewer than 1,000 employees if all the cuts go through. Hancock said employment has never been below 1,000 in the 21 years he's worked there. The company had already announced three, mandatory one-week furloughs for each month of the first quarter.

Workers who are permanently laid off will receive union-negotiated supplemental pay and health benefits, Hancock said, in addition to state unemployment benefits.

A state job office representative saw scant chance of the laid-off workers finding equally high-paying jobs in the same community.

With a couple of exceptions, "employers at this time are not hiring," said Nelda Clark, a supervisor in the state's Radford Workforce Center. "The prospects are fairly bleak for obtaining comparable employment."

She said her remarks pertained to the New River Valley, which has about 75,000 jobs. Manufacturing is the second largest industry, with about 11,000 workers, behind education with 13,500 workers and ahead of retail trade with nearly 8,000 personnel, according to the Virginia Employment Commission.

Pulaski County Administrator Pete Huber in a prepared release said the job announcement is "a sad sign of how the national and global economies affect our county."

Huber said municipal leaders are endeavoring to improve economic opportunities for residents by such efforts as supporting an expansion by FedEx; enlarging the New River Valley Competitiveness Center business incubator; equipping the New River Valley Commerce Park with water and sewer service; and marketing the region's assets to outside employers.

In addition, area economic developers are studying the possibility of creating a cluster of nanotechnology industries, a big-ticket project with large benefits if it comes to fruition.

Metalsa, a Mexico-based company with a plant in Botetourt County making rail frames for heavy trucks, is reducing production. The plant derives about half its business from the Volvo company, which has other production plants.

"We've got a production schedule for the first quarter that has short work weeks planned throughout the quarter," said Metalsa executive Steve Helgeson.

Meanwhile, Westport Corp. is assembling axles for the Volvo plant at a newly opened Roanoke facility. The company employs 44 and anticipates reaching 50 to 60.

"We have ramped up slowly knowing that market conditions are worsening, so hopefully our layoffs will be minimal if at all," spokeswoman Rena Sharpe said.

Looking ahead, Sharpe said, "I believe 2009 and the first quarter of 2010 will be very dismal. Indications are that the third quarter of 2010 will be the turnaround. Of course this is merely an educated guess which can still miss depending on the world market.

"Westport is committed to staying in the market and will make necessary adjustments to ensure our company's future."

Meanwhile, Goodyear will close its rubber-mixing plant on Friday. A total of 18 workers -- 12 hourly employees and six salaried employees -- will lose their jobs. Goodyear cut about 31 jobs at the plant in November, bringing the total job loss to 49 people.

Amy Brei, a Goodyear spokeswoman, said rubber-mixing production will shift to the plant in Buffalo, N.Y. The Radford plant supplied rubber to Goodyear's retreading operations.

"We have excess capacity right now in other facilities," a reality attributed to the economic downturn, she said.

Employees affected by the Goodyear closing will be paid for 60 days to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, Brei said.

United Steelworkers represents workers at Radford's Goodyear plant, which was once part of Brad Ragan Inc. Bob Pierce, an international representative for USW, said he does not know where the Goodyear workers will find comparable jobs.

"The whole economy is bad," Pierce said. "People are getting laid off all over the place."

For Corning, declining demand for the television and computer glass the company makes has forced the company to restructure after sales fell 30 percent to $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter.

Company spokeswoman Kelli Hopp-Michlosky said the effect on the local Corning plant will not be known until February.

"The business is in the process of determining how this will impact operations in each facility," she said in an e-mail. "We expect to be notifying employees in early February."

duncan.adams@roanoke.com 981-3324

jeff.sturgeon@roanoke.com 381-1661