UPDATE: According to the Tennessean, they’ve now closed too:
Nashville-based Gibson guitars closed facilities Friday in an effort to combat the spreading of the novel coronavirus.
Gibson confirmed a temporary closure hours after an order Sunday from Metro Public Health Department to stop all non-essential Nashville business, beginning Monday, for the next 14 days.
The Les Paul and SG model guitar maker operates facilities in Nashville and Bozeman, Montana. In Nashville, Gibson employs about 350 to 400 factory workers and about another 120 in a Nashville-based custom guitar shop.
There were no known coronavirus, or COVID-19, cases among employees at the time of closure, said J.C. Curleigh, Gibson CEO and president. Curleigh began leading the 126-year-old company in late 2018, after Gibson filed for bankruptcy.
“It’s unprecedented, and I think what we’re reading from the board to the leadership team to every individual at Gibson,” Curleigh said, “is no one’s been through this. It’s not as though there’s a playbook.”
Gibson plans to pay factory employees a $1,000 stipend for the two week closure. Company leadership will re-evaluate production after two weeks, with guidance from city, state and federal officials, Curleigh said.
“(There are) a lot of ways, as leaders, we’re navigating this unprecedented time together,” Curleigh said, later adding, “We have a prerogative as a leadership team … two weeks of a factory (closure) or a month of factory (closure) pales into insignificance of the rebuild we’ll all have to do.”
The Montana-based Gibson facility, which manufactures acoustic guitars, also closed Friday.
In Nashville, the brand migrated primary offices last July to Cummins Station. Gibson office employees, about 100 total, began working remotely last Wednesday, Curleigh said.
Good job Gibson. Music is great, but not right now.
Original Story below…
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This is not good, Gibson Guitars had better rethink this.
Via the Payday Report:
Nashville-based Gibson Guitars last week ordered its headquarters employees to work from home to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
However, out at its factory, on old Massam Drive in Nashville, over 300 blue-collar factory workers are being forced to come into Gibson’s factory to build guitars.
“The temperature in the plant is 80 degrees with 50-60% humidity. which is really not good if you are trying to keep a virus down,” says “Mel”, a Gibson Guitar worker, who declined to give their name out of fear of retaliation.
Workers at the plant say that it’s impossible to maintain 6 feet of social distance in the plant. Likewise, many workers haven’t been given protective gloves or masks to wear on the shop floor to spread of COVID-19.
“On the assembly line, people are working closely together. we all touch the guitars,” says Mel.
There is one turnstile in the plant and twice a day more than 300 workers try to exit the plant through the same turnstile. Likewise, all the workers use the same timeclock to check-in, a dangerous vector point for COVID-19.
Fear of the plant being a site of a potential outbreak of COVID was so intense that a local food truck that typically services the plant at break has stopped showing up.
However, workers say that Gibson Guitar management has told workers that they are going to continue production at the plant until there is a positive case of COVID among workers at the plant.]
Also the report says this:
In 2018, the company emerged from bankruptcy and has struggled since then; leading many to wonder if the company is risking workers’ lives for financial reasons.
“I don’t believe it is a necessity,” says Mel. “I realize they got a lot of backorders, but they are putting a lot of people at risk. There are a lot of people at this plant, who are older people, 50 and above, who have been there for many years and they are more at risk than others.”
Workers estimate that approximately 30% of the workforce is over the age of 50; making them at great risk of contracting COVID-19.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” says Mel. “We have the auto industry closing, the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee is closed because of coronavirus”.
Gibson Guitar has long had a reputation of being a hard-nosed employer.
In 1985, Gibson Guitars famously closed its unionized factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan to set up shop non-union in Nashville. The shop has remained non-union up to today, leaving many workers at the mercy of their employers as the pandemic strikes Nashville.