NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Several Middle Tennessee communities have been blindsided by corporations shutting down plants and distribution centers. In all, more than a thousand Tennesseans are losing their jobs.
“They’re removing machines, and they’re not putting new ones in place, so that’s a red flag. There are a lot of department consolidations,” employee Billy Kingsley said. “So everybody was getting kind of nervous about it, but I still think it was sooner than anybody expected.”
Kingsley has worked at the La Vergne Bridgestone plant for the past eight years. In a conversation with News 2, he thought back to when he started at the plant and reflected on the life he’d built around the plant and the relationships he’d made. For decades, the plant had been spinning its wheels many employees made a career of their time there.
“It’s all these people that we’ve worked with for years,” Kingsley said. “A lot of people have been there for 30 years, longer than I’ve been alive.”
It’s why the community of La Vergne was taken aback when the company announced its doors would be closing.
“The commute for me is decent and the pay is good, so starting out with a pay cut somewhere else would be painful [and] driving further to another Bridgestone plant would be inconvenient, so it’s a lot of unknowns right now,” Kingsley said.
Three distribution centers have announced closures. Along with the Bridgestone Plant, Bargain Hunt’s Distribution Center in Antioch is also shutting down, impacting about 300 workers. Last week, the Perdue Plant in Putnam County announced production would cease in late March.
“It had been decreasing in its number of employees over the last several years with new technology and and so forth, but we had no idea that the closure was coming,” Putnam County mayor Randy Porter said. “We thought everything was going good with them.”
Officials with Perdue said their decision came after a “strategic business and financial review of the Plant’s performance and its future viability.” Meanwhile, Putnam County leaders were quick to respond with plans to deploy a “Workforce Strike Team” to help people find new jobs.
“We think that that we’ll be able to find most of these folks a job,” Porter explained. “[We have] already contacted State Workforce Development, we have a rapid response strike team that’s ready to go as soon as Perdue files its paperwork with the state letting them know that it’s definitely closing.”
