One year after its opening, the Volkswagen assembly plant at Chattanooga, Tennessee is supporting significantly more jobs than it promised it would.
Volkswagen Chattanooga has announced the hiring and training of a third shift team and a new production schedule. This brings the number of plant employees to 3,300, far more than the 2,000 that Volkswagen promised to hire when it chose the city as a production location.
The three teams working at the factor will work according to a rotation of 40 hours over four shifts. The plant will be open six days a week, 20 hours a day. It is Volkswagen's only American production facility, and manufactures the Passat model. It opened with a capacity of 150,000 vehicles a year, but intends to increase this by 30,000 by 2013.
The company says that the new schedules will add predictability and balance to the lives of the Chattanooga employees, and that the employees were allowed input as to how they would be implemented.
"We have worked quickly over the last four months to recruit, hire and train our third shift team so that we can ease the work schedule of our production team, while maintaining the high standards for quality in our Passat," Hans-Herbert Jagla, executive vice-president for human resources at Volkswagen Chattanooga, said in a statement. "However, we continue to recruit for professional positions here at the plant."
"The hard work of our production team over the past year has not only produced a car that won the JD Powers APEAL award, but has also provided opportunity for these new employees," said Frank Fischer, chairman and CEO of Volkswagen Chattanooga. "We will all work to maintain the passion for detail that we build into the Passat."
Volkswagen claims to have invested $1 billion in the local Chattanooga economy. It further claims that the plant will ultimately generate $12 billion in income growth for the area and support 9,500 jobs, directly or indirectly.
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