Photo courtesy American Seating Co.

In the factory precincts of western Michigan, where automakers, their parts suppliers, and manufacturers of office furniture have all been forced to lay off workers or cut their hours to respond to the economic downturn, unemployment today stands at 11.3 percent.

But at American Seating Co. in Grand Rapids, the $787 billion stimulus program recently passed by Congress is already helping to fill the order book. The program mandates new investments in green energy and municipal transit—and American Seating builds seats for buses and rail cars.

“It looks like we’ll be hiring some people pretty soon,” Vice President of Transportation Sales Dave McLaughlin said last week. “Lots of times you see federal programs that don’t really work as they’re supposed to, but this has proven to be a very pleasant exception. I’ve been very impressed with how quickly we’re seeing the results of new federal spending trickle down to us.”

The growing order book will be good news for the line workers, too, says Mike Mundt, 59, who has worked at the plant for 37 years and is now president of United Auto Workers Local 135, which represents American Seating’s 340 hourly workers. In the past month, Mundt said, the union was able to call nearly two dozen workers back to the company, which also makes seats for concert halls, sports arenas and classrooms.

Mundt said workers in the auditorium and classroom seating side of the plant will go back to 40-hour weeks after being cut back to 32 hours. “Already, on the transportation side, some of the guys will get to work overtime. Of course the stimulus is a big help,” he said. Average hourly wages in the plant are about $16, he said.

“Sure, we were concerned about our jobs, the way things are going,” said Mundt, a crib attendant who distributes parts to work crews throughout the plant. “Now with the stimulus, we still have some worries, but it seems a little bit brighter out there for us.”

It’s clear that much of American Seating’s brighter future is because of the federal stimulus program. When Santa Monica, Calif., gets $7 million in new funds for hybrid buses, or King County, Wash., receives some $45.9 million to acquire new buses, some of that money trickles down to American Seating, where workers build a variety of seats to accommodate transit agencies.

Grand Rapids is helping the company, too. Stimulus spending is allowing the city to move up its schedule for building a new maintenance garage for its bus fleet, McLaughlin said, and that in turn is allowing the city to order 40 new buses earlier than it otherwise might have.

“We’re very enthused about the potential impact the stimulus will have on our business,” McLaughlin said. “I’m expecting to hear this week about new orders for well over 100 new racks of seats,” and the vast majority of these new orders, he says, are directly attributable to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the formal name for the stimulus law. “For every 100 buses of incremental business we get, we’ll go out and hire four to eight full-time workers for one year.”

McLaughlin noted that because the stimulus plan mandates that upward of $8 billion be spent on mass transit in the next 12 to 18 months, it encourages municipalities to place orders more quickly, and for manufacturers to shorten their lead times and pick up their production rates.

That’s good for the moment, Mundt says, since a nearby General Motors stamping plant is scheduled to be shut down. “At American Seating we are very lucky, very fortunate right now to have jobs,” he said. “We just wonder, how long is this going to last?”

Michael Zielenziger writes about the economy for Bulletin Today.