Diamond Foods Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. have called off their $1.5 billion deal for Diamond to buy the Pringles brand. Cereal maker Kellogg Co. is swooping and made a $2.7 billion deal to purchase the brand.Perhaps demonstrating the region's ebbing manufacturing power, Karl Schmidt Unisia Inc. announced Monday it will close its Fort Wayne piston plant this year.
The plant now employs only 38 production workers. But as Zollner Piston, the company employed more than 1,200 in its heyday and was the namesake of the Fort Wayne Pistons basketball team that later became the Detroit Pistons.
"It's the direct effect of what's happening in the auto industry," said Mike Windberg, Karl Schmidt's director of human resources. "There's a couple of contracts in Fort Wayne that will cease to exist in 2009."
Officials with Marinette, Wis.-based Karl Schmidt notified workers about the closure Monday morning. Officials with the union that represents them, United Auto Workers Local 2357, couldn't be reached late Monday afternoon for comment.
Windberg said production workers at the Karl Schmidt plant at 2425 Coliseum Blvd. S. earn between $17 and $19 an hour.
"It really has nothing to do with the union," Windberg said. "They've been fantastic to work with."
Rather, the plant's customer base had shrunk to just struggling General Motors Corp., and it was making pistons and piston rings mostly for large-displacement engines, Windberg said.
An engine-testing lab that's also on the site employs 10. It will continue to operate in conjunction with Karl Schmidt's engineering operation in Auburn Hills, Mich., Windberg said.
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