The Closing of Cooper Tyres

By T.B.D and D Rose for Devizine.
The author can be reached at housetyg@gmail.com

This month the historic Cooper Tires factory in Melksham which began the Avon Tyres brand closes after more than 130 years of tyre production, with 350 workers losing their jobs…..

The rubber factory in Limpley Stoke moved to what was once a woollen mill in Melksham in1890 and began producing tyres three years later. The Avon India Rubber Company (named after the River Avon, which was filled in and
diverted to create land for the growing rubber works!), later to become Avon Rubber in the sixties, grew as a business and went on to supply tyres for military use during World War I and for championship racing from the 1950s onward.

Avon Tyres was purchased in 1997 for sixty million by the Cooper Tire and Rubber Company from Ohio USA and then became a subsidiary of Goodyear (named after Charles Goodyear, an early backer of the rubber industry in Bradford on Avon), the tyre supplier for NASCAR, after Goodyear bought Cooper for 2.5 billion dollars in 2021.

It’s been a bumpy ride for the Cooper Tires; back in 2013 they were faced with an industrial revolt when five thousand of their Chinese workers from the Cooper factory in Shandong went on strike, successfully stopping the company being bought by Apollo, the Indian multinational who got raided in April last year for misusing “sensitive information” to gouge prices. Price gouging, according to a Unite The Union investigation, is a major catalyst for
recent inflation.

In October 2018 after a mass “management briefing” was called to discuss cutbacks at the Melksham factory, apparently due to the site being the “the highest cost facility in the global Cooper network”, the company assured the Bournemouth Echo that Cooper will “still employ hundreds locally and continue to honour its existing obligations”.

Light vehicle production was moved to Coopers overseas facilities where labour costs are lower, such as their unit in the Serbian city of Kruševac, which had been purchased seven years prior for thirteen million dollars and into which the company invested up to fifty million, the very same unit workers from Melksham had been sent to to train their Serbian counterparts in manufacturing techniques.

Cooper Tires announced the closure of their factory in Melksham, which produced three to four thousand tyres a year, in 2022. The American owned company says the reason they’re closing the factory in Melksham is
because they’ve “struggled to be competitive” in the “current business environment”.

The brand slogan of the Cooper Tire and Rubber Company is “The tire with two names …the company and the man who built it” but who really built it? I say the workers did, workers who’ve now lost their livelihoods the way the River Avon lost its old course, to profit maximisation. I found a particularly poignant comment whilst researching this story. I hope its author won’t
mind my inclusion of it: “watched the local news with a tear in my eye tonight. They said 3 to 5 years in 2019. They weren’t lying. A major blow for the town and all my friends still working down there. Best of luck for the future to you all. 28 years of great memories for me. Grateful to have been a part
of it”.

The reckless pattern of layoffs in favour of cheap labour must end. It’s about time more of us stood up and spoke out, and gave our society some sturdier
wheels.