Transcontinental Direct USA, one of the leading direct marketing service providers in the country, which gets a majority of its work from credit and financial institutions, is cutting 50 indirect positions, including supervision and management positions, clerical, warehouse, material handlers and mechanic jobs from its Orwigsburg, Hamburg and Reading locations.
Executive Vice President for East Coast Direct Mail Operations Chris Carosella said the company was informing employees Monday of the cuts.
He was unsure how many job losses will occur in each facility because of the cuts.
Carosella said Monday the company has seen a reduction in direct mail output from financial institutions.
“We’re one of the largest direct mail high volume producers in the country and we’ve seen our customers reduce volume,” Carosella said. “We service work for the largest financial companies in the country, they have cut back their mail volumes.”
He declined to discuss why clients would choose to reduce their mail volume.
The company is consolidating three “direct support structure” groups in the Hamburg, Reading and Orwigsburg facilities to the Hamburg site at 100 Industrial Dr., Carosella said.
“This is immediate,” he said.
Carosella was unsure Monday when employees’ last days would be.
Carosella said there are more than 150 operators in the Orwigsburg and Reading sites.
“All the operators, the machine operators, will have the opportunity to work in Hamburg,” he said.
He said the company has cleared space at the Hamburg site for operator employees and the direct mail inserting machines.
“We’re going to move all the operators in ... We’re still employing most of the operators,” he said.
Transcontinental Direct bought Jetson Direct Mail Inc. for $85 million in February 2005, making them the largest-capacity provider of direct mail services in North America.
Hamburg — formerly the JDM facility — is about an hour from Transcontinental Direct’s Philadelphia headquarters and printing facilities.
JDM had five facilities in Pennsylvania, including the printing plant and direct mail letter shop plant in Hamburg and three satellite direct mail plants in Reading, Orwigsburg and Frackville.
Carosella said there are over 1,000 positions between the Hamburg, Reading, Frackville and Orwigsburg locations. He added that the 50 jobs lost is equal to about four percent of the employees at the locations.
The Frackville location is unaffected by the consolidations, he said.
The Orwigsburg location at 298 Lincoln Ave. will continue to operate as a two-shift warehousing operation with about six employees, Carosella said. The company will receive material there and feed it to the Hamburg operation, he said.
About 90 operators worked at the Orwigsburg site, he said.
“It allows us to produce more mail out of Hamburg, essentially,” Carosella said. “It was a satellite ... It ran inserting machines and had material stored there ... It will now operate more as a warehouse to feed Hamburg.”
“It will be a bigger warehouse operation ... We’ll receive tractor trailer loads all day in Orwigsburg and ship them to Hamburg as we need them,” he said.
Production will cease at the Reading facility at 4201 Pottsville Pike, the smallest Transcontinental Direct USA operation, which employed about 60 operators, Carosella said. He said it will not be a warehouse.
“There will be some material and some machines stored down there for a while,” he said.
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