Harley-Davidson Is Moving Some Bike Production Overseas

Here is a news item that some people thought would never happen, while others saw it as inevitable: Harley-Davidson is about to move some of its motorcycle production overseas.

This isn’t shocking news at first. For years, Harley-Davidson has had factories in various countries building bikes for those markets. In fact, it had a factory in Japan well before the Second World War. But over the past hundred-or-so years of overseas production, Harley-Davidsons built outside the U.S. were not sold inside the States. Remember the Street 500 and Street 750? Even those designed-by-India, built-by-India bikes were built in the U.S. market for buyers in that country.

When Harley-Davidson’s new made-in-China 350 was revealed to be destined for the U.S., the MoCo’s leadership said it was only going to be used for rider training, not for public roads. Harley-Davidsons for Americans would always be built by Americans, they said.

Well, that’s going to change, as the Harley-Davidson factory in York, Pennsylvania will see production of Pan America and Sport models (including the new Sportster, not the old Evo model) moving to Harley-Davidson’s factory in Thailand. Note that the factory in York isn’t shutting down; instead, it will shift to EV production, presumably of LiveWire electric moto models. The company just announced an $89 million (!!!!!) investment from government into that project.

The moto public doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to the news yet, but the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (aka IAM, the union that builds a lot of American-made Harleys) is very unhappy with the move. As per a statement on their website:

“Harley-Davidson’s recent announcement to ship our work and jobs to Thailand is a kick in the teeth to American workers and a betrayal of the company’s legacy as an American icon. In 2019, nearly 600 IAM members at Harley-Davidson and Syncreon in Kansas City lost their jobs when the company shuttered its facility, claiming that its Thailand plant would only serve the Asian and European markets.

“Harley-Davidson has backtracked on that promise, planning to manufacture these bikes abroad and send them back to the U.S. for American consumers.”

See the full statement here. For its part, Harley-Davidson says the total number of jobs will stay the same, even if the jobs themselves are changed. Maybe that’s true, but that doesn’t mean times won’t be tough for York employees if their Pan-America-assembly job is replaced for a battery-pack-building job. But, remember: If the government meets its plans for EV introductions over the next decade, stories like this will be ubiquitous across the entire vehicle production sector in all of North America.