NSK NSK Corp. NSK Bennington, NSK JAPAN, NSK Clarinda plant closures, fraud, corporate culture, Ann Arbor, Bennington Michigan, Vermont

I am an employee of NSK corporate.

For months I have sat in meetings listening to plans to close or significantly reduce the size of our Bennington plant.

My concern isn't that NSK management feels the need to down size a plant for business purposes but rather the time and effort which we have spent on how to deceive our employees.

Our senior leadership in both Japan and Ann Arbor Michigan have spent countless hours and thousands of dollars scheming of ways to deceive our employees so that we don't prematurely impact our revenue stream.

There is a fear that if we announced our true intentions that we would experience a mass exodus of our "Key Employees as there are only so many jobs in the area.

The primary plan has been to do a bate and switch. To get the employees to believe we are moving old equipment ( existing equipment) and replacing it with new equipment from Japan so they believe Japan is investing in them. The old equipment is simply being sent to our other steering plant in Tennessee so we can increase capacity of key components as we prepare to build a bank of parts.

Mr. Sugiyama (local Japanese senior steering manager) and other top us officials in Ann Arbor have been working on this for over 6 months.

The plan, approved by U. S. and Japanese CEOs is called project viper; appropiately so.

Mr. Sugiyama chuckles ever time we say the name. He reflects on the last time NSK sneakily fooled the employees of a plant which he closed in the UK.

This temporary down sizing will result in the layoff of approximately 67 percent of the plants workforce and despite what we will tell our employees, the ultimate closure of a plant which has not been invested in and is seen as a dinosaur and a boat anchor to the corporation. 

The deception with which this this plan and been concocted, for the sole purpose of protecting NSK business interests is almost criminal.

When I raised the idea of communicating our intentions to the employees sooner rather than later thereby providing them with the opportunity to find new employment, and protect their families the idea was handily dismissed by the new steering president.  They will be fine and we will compensate them or hey can move to Tennessee.

Now there is widespread fear among NSK Americas and NSK Japan that their plan is being leaked so we are planning on informing the employees in January of some "future changes"! 

I would have reported this through the NSK internal hot line but those concerns are vetted by what many believe to be an incompetent HR department led by miss ellie and by our legal VP whose Go Along / Get along style of business is horrible for the employees and the company alike.

Hopefully you will look into this and press our leadership to stop worrying about their bonuses and start caring about a plant which has been in business for over 30 years.

Even though the desire is to close the Bennington plant the CEO believes that giving the current political environment, along with us sending more and more work to our new Mexico plant and our behind the scenes effort to take the same action with our plant in clearings Iowa; that we are better off calling it a restructuring and tell everyone that we are turning it into a preprocessing plant.

Our focus is Mexico because of unskilled, low cost labor.  We have no sells strategy. Our japanes HQ has left us with nothing to sell and are only focused on the China market.

NSK leadership cannot be trusted at any level.

Corporate engineering representatives like Mr. McDonald and his guys go there on a regular basis and simply lie point blank to the faces of the plant team when they know we are planning to impact their livelihood.

I wish we would have invested the millions of dollars from our anti-trust fines in developing steering systems for the US market instead of lying and cheating.  Again, a corporate leadership culture issue. 

This is wrong. NSK and its leadership team used to have the trust and respect of its employees.

Just wait until they see what they get for Christmas. I assure you it will not be any part of the millions of dollars that we pay our executives each year for making such classless decisions.

NSK plant employees need to consider forming a union or seeking legal advice to protect themselves.

When NSK leadership seeks legal advises on how to circumvent the WARN act this is just wrong.