Sep. 30--The manufacturer of heavy-duty Peterbilt trucks is closing a plant near Nashville after a protracted labor dispute and will consolidate operations at its Denton facility.

But the move to close the Madisonville, Tenn., plant won't have any immediate effect on Denton operations or employment, because demand for new trucks has fallen dramatically during the recession.

"At this time it [the move] hasn't affected us at all," said Bill Jackson, general manager for Peterbilt Motors Co.'s Denton plant. "The market is way off so we've got plenty of capacity."

Peterbilt is a subsidiary of Bellevue, Wash.-based Paccar, which also owns the Kenworth heavy-duty truck line in North America and several international operations. The move to consolidate manufacturing and assembly of Peterbilt over-the-road trucks was announced Monday.

Jackson declined to give employment figures at the plant, but the Denton Chamber of Commerce's most recent count put the number at 1,500, according to its Web site.

The company's sales in 2009 are dramatically lower than a year ago, before the global economic slump commenced in earnest. For the first six months of 2009, Paccar's revenue from its truck business was $3.3 billion, down 55 percent from $7.4 billion in 2008.

The Nashville plant, which employed about 390 people, had all but ceased operations in June 2008 when Peterbilt halted production. The company took the action, Jackson said, after United Auto Workers Local 1832 refused to vote on the company's contract proposal.

Mike Pardue, president of Local 1832, said the proposal sought major economic concessions and work rule changes. He said the company would not provide the union with cost data to evaluate the proposal.

"Peterbilt said Nashville was the highest-cost plant it had," Pardue said. "If that in fact was true, we could have negotiated some changes."

Without the cost information, Pardue said, the union leadership could not evaluate Peterbilt's proposal and make a recommendation to its membership.

Pardue said the company locked out the workers and refused to negotiate. At the time of the shutdown the plant's production had dropped to 16 trucks a day, compared with 68 a day in January 2007.

The Denton plant has a capacity of about 10 trucks per hour and recorded a peak work force of about 2,000. The company laid off 172 workers in January, according to the Denton Record-Chronicle.

BOB COX, 817-390-7723

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