Caterpillar Peterlee plant plans 100 jobs
Jan 5 2011 by Iain Laing, The Journal
AMERICAN manufacturing giant Caterpillar is poised to double production at its County Durham plant and take on 100 staff after recovering from the impact of the economic slowdown.
The heavy vehicle company axed about 400 of its 1,000-plus workers two years ago after the collapse of the construction industry led to a plunge in demand for its trucks and earth-movers.
But despite demand plunging by nearly 90% between 2008 and 2009, the management say orders started coming back last year and they now expect production to return to 2007 levels by the end of this year.
Phil Handley, manager of the 42-acre Peterlee site, said: “Looking back to where we were in 2007 and 2008, the facility reached a peak in production and then in the fourth quarter of 2008 we started to see signs of the slowdown in the US construction market.
“Soon we were working at a third of our capacity and demand dropped by 86%. We tried to make efficiencies as much as we could. The staff went on short-term working. Bonuses were reduced and the employees made a lot of sacrifices. But in the end we had to lose 300 agency staff and around 100 core workers.
“But it has really started to come back. By April last year we were back to near normal working and orders had doubled and later in the year the order book rose to four times what it was 12 months before. It is looking very good now.”
The plant recruited 250 agency workers last year to help with the growth in business and it is now hoping to approach its former capacity of 3,000 vehicles a year by the end of this year.
