International Motors has stopped work at its plant on Urbana Road in Springfield, Ohio. Wednesday, 30 September, was the company's final day of operations there, and the 1,341 workers on its notice to the state are now laid off.
Trucks have been built on the site since 1961, according to Transport Topics, by International under its present name and its earlier ones, International Harvester and Navistar. Dave Shinkle, a millwright who worked there for 29 years, came in on the last day although he was not on the schedule. "It's family-oriented, you've got a lot of camaraderie with all the employees," he told the Dayton Daily News. He called it "probably the best job I've ever had."
The closure came in the final weeks of an election campaign in which Ohio's Senate seat is contested, and three days before President Trump held a rally near Dayton. But the immediate reason International sold the plant was not tariffs. It was that the plant's main customer stopped making the truck it built.
One contract
Most of Springfield's capacity was given over to building Chevrolet Silverado medium-duty trucks for General Motors, under a contract arrangement that dates to a 2015 deal between GM and what was then Navistar. Production began in 2018. GM is discontinuing the Silverado 4500HD, 5500HD and 6500HD, Transport Topics reported, and the contract expired on 30 September.
The rest of the plant built International's own CV Series, a medium-duty work truck launched in 2018 as part of the venture with GM. When International announced in March that it would sell the plant, it said CV production would end too. The last CV trucks were scheduled for 10 September.
"With the end of our contract manufacturing agreement, we have been working diligently to find a suitable path for the Springfield assembly plant," Samara Strycker, International's chief financial officer, said at the time.
The company itself was already shrinking. International's truck and bus sales fell 30 per cent in 2025, to 63,700 vehicles, according to Transport Topics, and it cut 900 jobs at its plant in Escobedo, Mexico, in April 2025. Its HV and MV models, once built in Springfield, are now made in San Antonio, Texas.
What 1,341 jobs means in Clark County
International told the state in July that it would lay off 1,314 people at the assembly plant and 27 at the truck specialty center next door. Of those, 1,158 were represented by United Auto Workers Local 402.
The Springfield metropolitan area, which is Clark County, had 46,900 payroll jobs in August, seasonally adjusted, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The layoffs are equal to 2.9 per cent of them. The area had about 6,200 manufacturing jobs, so the plant accounted for something like a fifth of its factory work.
The Associated Press described the layoffs as large enough to erase a year of job growth in greater Dayton. The BLS figures bear that out. The neighbouring Dayton-Kettering metro added about 800 jobs between August 2025 and August 2026, while Springfield lost about 500.
New factory announcements elsewhere in the country do not necessarily add jobs to offset closures like this one. Caterpillar's $1 billion plant in Sanford, North Carolina, announced on Wednesday, comes with no increase in its workforce there.
The buyer
The plant and the specialty center, more than 2 million square feet on about 500 acres, are being sold to Roshel, a defence and commercial vehicle maker based in Brampton, Ontario. In March, International said Roshel would use Springfield as a hub for "U.S. based, vertically integrated production of commercial, special and armored vehicles."
In a statement to the AP, Roshel said it was "working with everyone involved not only to protect the current workforce, but to more than double it over the coming years through a phased process." Laid-off workers told the AP they expected to be hired back by Roshel within six to 12 months. Under the purchase agreement, International said, Roshel has agreed to recognise the union and negotiate a new contract.
The city is still waiting for details. "We do not have any additional details to provide regarding Roshel's timing for their project," Tom Franzen, the city's development director and an assistant city manager, told the Dayton Daily News and Springfield News-Sun on Wednesday. "We have not been notified of any changes since the company's original announcement." The newspapers said their attempts to reach Roshel had not succeeded, and an International spokeswoman declined to answer questions.
In the meantime, the workers are between employers. Kyle Bos, 30, who has two daughters and a third child due in January, told the AP he was finished with a president he had voted for three times. Marianne Donnelly, who drove a forklift, said the overtime tax break had done little for her. "We weren't getting a lot of overtime because of the economy," she said. "There just wasn't any to be had."
The WARN notice figures and union representation, and International Motors' statement about Roshel recognising the union, are from WYSO's report of 29 July 2026 as published by WVXU. The reasons for the sale, the GM contract, the end of the CV Series, the size of the site, the history of the plant and International's 2025 sales are from Transport Topics (published at the time of the March announcement and updated). The comments from Tom Franzen and the Roshel chief executive's March statement are from the Dayton Daily News and Springfield News-Sun (30 September and 1 October 2026). The recollections of Dave Shinkle are from the Dayton Daily News (3 October 2026). Roshel's statement on its workforce plans and the remarks of Kyle Bos and Marianne Donnelly are from the Associated Press (3 October 2026), as published by TribLive. Employment figures for the Springfield and Dayton-Kettering metropolitan areas are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' State and Metro Area Employment series (total nonfarm seasonally adjusted, manufacturing not seasonally adjusted; August 2026); the shares and the comparison with a year's job growth are this publication's calculations. Accurate to 9pm ET on 3 October 2026.
Topics nationalmanufacturinglayoffslabor
