Good news for a change.
PONTIAC - General Motors plans to hire almost 300 workers and invest 545 million dollars in five Michigan plants.
A spokesman for the world's largest automaker says 163 million of that will go to GM's Pontiac Assembly Center, which makes the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups. Production of the next generation of those vehicles is scheduled to begin later this year.
In addition, the company plans to hire 280 people at the Pontiac plant - all workers who are currently employed at G-M plants or who had lost their jobs. G-M has several thousand workers in a jobs bank who get most of their pay and benefits even when they're not working.
The news is good for Michigan, which has lost an estimated 130-thousand auto manufacturing jobs in the last five years. Still, the investment is dwarfed by the struggling G-M's restructuring plan, which calls for cutting 30-thousand jobs nationally by 2008.