Cat says 300 at Mossville received layoff notices
- Details
- Published on Friday, 02 September 2016 15:34
- Written by Paul Gordon
Caterpillar Inc. said Friday that 300 of its employees in Mossville were notified this week of their impending layoff.
The company said it was employees in the engineering and support staffs that were given WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) Act letters informing them that their jobs were being eliminated by Oct. 31, 2016. The 300 included managers, as well, the company said, and work in Building AC and the Tech Center at Mossville.
The letters started going out on Monday of this week, but the company declined earlier to say how many were affected. On Friday it did not disclose the number of employees at its Mossville facilities but said there were about 13,100 in the Peoria area at the end of the second quarter.
These layoffs are part of the overall global restructuring Caterpillar announced nearly one year ago, when it said it would close and/or consolidate facilities and operations and cut its workforce by about 10,000 worldwide.
Since then the company has made restructuring announcements on a periodic basis. Two weeks ago, on the same day it announced the consolidation of its Mossville units that led to the 300 WARN letters, the company announced restricting and consolidations within its mining divisions that would result in the closure of plants, including in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and the elimination of hundreds of jobs.
The restructuring went overseas on Friday, when the company announced it is considering closing a product facility in Belgium and moving that work to a plant in Grenoble, France and other non-European facilities. If that occurs it would result in the elimination of up to 2,000 jobs, the company said.
The Belgium factory manufactures construction equipment.
On Thursday, the company informed employees of a factory in Northern Ireland that it would close one plant and reduce the workforce there by 200 to 250 over the next two years. The Monkstown facility that will close manufactures electric power generator sets.
Regarding the 300 who received WARN letters here, Caterpillar said some of those workers will be relocated to other positions within Caterpillar before the layoffs take effect. The company has said it will work with those who are laid off to find other work and those will receive severance packages.
