Workers blockade plant to protest possible factory closure

Union official: Opel’s Antwerp plant to close

BRUSSELS — General Motors plans to close Opel’s plant in Antwerp, Belgium with the loss of more than 2,300 jobs, a German trade union official said Thursday, as workers blockaded the factory parking lot in protest.

Franco Biagiotti, the head of the employee council at Opel’s plant in Bochum, Germany, told the DAPD press agency that the head of Adam Opel GmbH, Nick Reilly, had said this week that the Antwerp plant would close.

Belgian press reports also reported, without quoting sources, that an Opel management meeting Thursday had been told the factory would close at the end of June.

Opel would not comment but announced a press conference in Brussels for 1100GMT (6 a.m. EST).

Workers in Antwerp occupied the factory’s parking lot in protest at the possible job losses on Wednesday afternoon.

The fate of the Antwerp plant has been uncertain for some time. When General Motors Co. planned to sell its European car making unit to Canada’s Magna and Russia’s Sberbank last year, the bidders said they would close it down. GM later decided not to sell its European business.

German daily Welt reported Thursday that most of Antwerp’s Astra production is to be transferred to the plant in Bochum, citing anonymous sources from the workers’ council.

Opel said in 2007 that it would stop making the Astra at Antwerp and would possibly replace it with midsize Chevrolet models or sport utility vehicles — heavy vehicles that now find fewer buyers as cash-for-clunkers programs and cash-strapped customers favor more fuel-efficient cars.

The plant, which opened in 1929, has already shrunk from employing 7,000 workers at its peak to around a third of that today.

Belgium’s De Standaard newspaper said GM would lay out details of restructuring for all European factories at a Jan. 28 meeting with unions.

The Belgian government has tried to stave off the Antwerp plant’s closure by earlier this year offering the company up to euro500 million ($707 million) to upgrade the facilities.