LORDSTOWN — Some General Motors employees kept on the job after the Lordstown assembly plant idled to continue stamping Chevrolet Cruze replacement parts could continue to work through the end of June.

Spokesman for the automaker, Daniel Flores, who was responding to a question from the Tribune Chronicle, wrote in an email it “looks like metal stamping service work will be completed by the end of 2nd quarter.”

He wrote he could not provide a specific end date “now other than end of Q2.”

“The production schedule is driven by the company’s service needs for the parts,” Flores wrote Tuesday.

About 240 employees remain inside the facility, the first of five GM plants in North America it intends to idle this year as it shifts focus to making trucks, SUVs and electric and autonomous vehicles. That number, according to Flores, includes people needed to do the stamping work and maintenance in the assembly plant.

Flores said earlier this month the facility will be kept in a “state of readiness” after production of the Cruze stopped, which happened March 6.

“There will be a staff of skilled trades to make sure everything is operating, to keep an eye on the facility, to make sure there is nothing that needs repaired, or if something needs repaired, it gets repaired,” Flores said March 4. “The facility will be kept in a state of readiness because of its unallocated status.”

General Motors has gotten some outside interest in the facility and Cruze, but Flores noted the future of the unallocated plants, including Lordstown, will be determined when the company and United Auto Workers meet later this year to work out a new national collective bargaining agreement. The contract expires Sept. 14.

There is a lawsuit in federal court in Youngstown to stop GM from idling the Lordstown plant and the two in Michigan, the Warren Transmission Plant in Warren, Mich., and Detroit-Hamtramck, which was set to close on June 1, but the company is keeping it open until January 2020 to continue production of the Chevrolet Impala and Cadillac CT6.

The UAW claims an agreement it has with GM bars GM from closing any plant during the course of the existing collective bargaining agreement that doesn’t expire until Sept. 14. GM said placing the plants on “unallocated” status does not violate the agreement.