Michigan virus outbreak slows down Aram trucking facility in Sterling Heights, the source said

DETROIT Michigan’s worst COVID-19 outbreak is starting to slow down car production, with a large Aram pickup plant reducing its production due to a large number of absent workers.

About 10% of the production force at the Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler) assembly plant in Sterling Heights, north of Detroit, has tested positive or is in quarantine, a person informed of the situation said Friday. That equates to about 600 workers, the person said, who asked not to be identified because neither the company nor the United Auto Workers union disclose details.

The 5 million-square-foot factory has about 7,450 hourly workers, but not all are on the assembly line. To try to stem the shortage, the company recruited workers from a bakery factory in nearby Warren, Michigan, which was forced to close by the global shortage of semiconductors.

But because the workers need to be trained to build the new Ram pickups, the assembly line is moving slower than normal, said the person who did not know how much production was lost.

Advertisement

As it has been doing for weeks, Michigan is still going below the country’s highest seven-day business rate, 538 per 100,000 residents, the federal government reports.

The UAW has confirmed that the number of cases at Sterling Heights is increasing. Many of the absent workers did not test positive, but are awaiting tests or isolation due to close contact with others who have the virus, the union said.

“Although the numbers are changing with shifting, we can say that there has been a recent increase in cases, as in the whole of Michigan,” UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada said in a statement.

She urged workers to be careful “to keep the plants and our UAW members and families safe.”

Stellantis also declined to give figures, but confirmed that employees should test positive for the coronavirus as cases in Michigan increase.

The company said in a statement that it had taken steps to keep factory workers safe and called on them to be vaccinated.

Advertisement

“We remain aggressive in following the recommended guidelines for detecting contact,” the statement said. “We also strongly encourage our employees to follow the same health and safety precautions when traveling.”

The Ram pickup, the third most popular vehicle in the US, is a major profit driver for Stellantis. The company sold 563,000 of the trucks last year.

Stellantis’ competitors Ford and General Motors have each said they have not lost any production in recent weeks due to virus cases.

The slowdown in Sterling Heights production was reported by Bloomberg News on Friday.

Read more: Motor News