On May 13, 2026, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company opened formal talks with the United Steelworkers union to close its Fayetteville, North Carolina tire factory by the end of 2027. The closure will eliminate 1,700 jobs at one of Goodyear's three largest North American facilities, a 2.2 million square foot plant that produces roughly 31,000 passenger tires and 10,500 light truck tires per day. USW Local 959 represents all 1,700 workers and is one of the largest union chapters in the Fayetteville region.
The plant opened in 1969 as a Kelly-Springfield Tire Co. facility (a Goodyear subsidiary) and was rebranded under the Goodyear name in 2005. After 57 years of operation, the company said the closure is necessary "to strengthen Goodyear's ability to compete in today's marketplace and support the long-term health of the business." Goodyear is Cumberland County's fifth-largest employer.
The Fayetteville announcement marks an inflection point in Goodyear's two-year restructuring program, branded "Goodyear Forward," which is now explicitly pivoting from European cost cuts toward the Americas. The company has already announced closures at Fulda and Furstenwalde in Germany, Danville VA, and Tall Timbers, with the Fayetteville closure now the largest single piece of the program disclosed to date. Goodyear is targeting $325 million in additional savings in 2026 on top of the $194 million in 2025 cost actions that already eliminated 1,750 jobs.
The case for closing Fayetteville is built on what Goodyear calls a "competitive cost structure" problem: the plant's product mix overlaps heavily with newer, lower-cost facilities the company operates in Latin America and Mexico, and management concluded that further capital reinvestment in the 57-year-old footprint would not close the gap.
Goodyear reported a $1.7 billion net loss for full-year 2025 and continued bleeding into 2026, with Q1 2026 revenue of $3.88 billion (down from $4.25 billion a year earlier) and a net loss of $246 million versus a $118 million profit in Q1 2025. Management points to two compounding pressures: weak industry demand across passenger and commercial replacement tires, and raw material cost inflation tied to Middle East conflict disruptions that have lifted natural rubber and oil-derivative inputs throughout 2025 and into 2026.
The 1,700 cuts are a significant share of the local manufacturing base. USW Local 959 said it intends to "bargain the effects" of the closure decision with the goal of softening severance, retraining, and transition terms for affected members. The Fayetteville plant has been a fixture of regional economic development for over five decades, and its closure removes one of the largest single private-sector employers from the county tax base.
The Fayetteville closure puts Goodyear in the same broad weight class as Stellantis, Volkswagen Group, and Nissan among legacy industrials shrinking their developed-market footprint while preserving capacity in lower-cost regions. For investors, the test is whether Goodyear Forward's $325M 2026 savings target lands in cash savings or gets eaten by the closure cost and pension liabilities. For tire-industry watchers, the bigger question is whether U.S. tire manufacturing can hold its current share against Mexico, Brazil, and Asian imports, or whether more 50-plus-year-old U.S. plants follow Fayetteville's path before 2028.