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Another area RV maker is shedding jobs.
Middlebury-based Jayco Corp. announced Monday that will close its plant in Topeka where its Starcraft RV subsidiary operated. The plant employs 244 who earn between $12 and $25 an hour.
Jayco will move production of Starcraft campers to Middlebury, which is in Elkhart County and about 19 miles from Topeka.
“We plan to move as many people from Topeka to Middlebury as possible,” said Sid Johnson, Jayco’s director of marketing. “But right now, I think that would be very few.”
With decreased sales of Jayco’s other products, Johnson said moving Starcraft production to Middlebury likely would be just enough to keep workers there busy.
Starcraft RV makes a line of pop-up campers, truck campers, travel trailers and fifth-wheel trailers. Johnson said the company would probably complete the closure of the Topeka plant in January.
In a statement issued by Jayco, President and CEO Derald Bontrager acknowledged the hardship the cutbacks would cause.
“But the industry has been hit hard, first by runaway fuel prices and, more recently, by severely diminished consumer confidence and a significant decline in the supply of credit at both the retail and wholesale levels,” Bontrager said in the statement.
LaGrange County’s unemployment rate was 8.9 percent in September, well above the state average of 6.2 percent. It was also twice as high as its 4.3 percent rate for September 2007, according to the latest available data from the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.
Johnson said the company hopes to reopen the Topeka plant when the economy stabilizes and consumer demand returns.
“But I can’t say when that will be,” he said.
Starcraft traces its history in northern Indiana back to 1903, when it made livestock tanks and other metal farm equipment, the company’s Web site says. In the 1920s, Starcraft got into boat building and in 1964, it started making campers.
The company was in bankruptcy when Jayco acquired it in 1991, Johnson said.
This has been a tough year for the RV industry.
Last month, Ameri-Camp shut down its operation in Syracuse. It employed about 125, according to the 2007 Harris Indiana Industrial Directory.
In July, Monaco Coach Corp. announced that it would shutter three Elkhart County plants, idling 1,400 workers.
And in June, Fleetwood Enterprises Inc. announced that it would cut 300 jobs in Decatur and 57 more in Edgerton, Ohio. In October, the company moved operations from its plant in Paxinos, Pa., to its Decatur plant, but the move didn’t mean any additional jobs for Adams County.
mschladen@jg.net
