Over 350 PACCAR employees will be out of job soon

Hundreds of PACCAR employees will be dismissed from the factory in Kenworth, Ohio, from September 10.

The information on termination was announced at the factory’s meeting in late August.

It’s reported that hundreds of  already produced Kenworth trucks stand idle at the factory and the Ross County fairgrounds due to a microchip shortage triggered by the pandemic.

The company planned to assemble the trucks and insert the chips as soon as they became available.

Other car makers, including Toyota, General Motors, Ford and Nissan, were forced to close factories due to ongoing chip shortages, which experts say could last until 2023.

Kazunori Ito, head of stock market research at Chicago-based investment research firm Morningstar Inc., told investors during a conference call last week that the biggest problem of microchip shortages «should vanish in or around 2023.» Itoh also said that the ongoing supply shortfall

«took place because of low efficiency of suppliers, who are trying to buy more components than they need.»

As a reminder, in 2020, hundreds of workers were laid off at the Chillicothe factory after the company cut its daily truck assembly norm.