From Associated Press, Detroit Free Press
ARGOS, IND — Former employees of a closed Indiana auto parts plant are suing a Michigan company and its top executives, accusing them of lying to the government and holding up benefits provided under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
More than 300 former employees of Oxford Automotive Inc. are named as plaintiffs in a complaint alleging the Troy, Mich.-based company and nine former and current company officials engaged in fraud and criminal conversion. The case was filed Friday in Marshall Circuit Court.
When Oxford closed the plant about 30 miles south of South Bend in 2001, some of its machinery was sent to an Oxford plant in Ramos Arizpe, Mexico, the suit alleges.
Former Oxford employees repeatedly petitioned the U.S. Labor Department for NAFTA-authorized displaced worker benefits such as additional unemployment compensation, education and training. But the government rejected the claim because Oxford maintained that production had not moved across the border and the equipment remained idle.
“The problem here is this: You can’t get those benefits unless the employer admits to the government that in fact, they have shifted their manufacturing capacity and they are using it across the border,” plaintiffs attorney John Hamilton of South Bend, Mich., said Wednesday.
Because the workers were denied benefits, some went through bankruptcies, divorces and other economic and psychological duress.
“They experienced exactly what NAFTA benefits were intended to ameliorate,” Hamilton said.
Last November, however, nearly three years after the Argos plant closed, the Labor Department agreed Oxford had indeed moved production to Mexico.
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