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Morton Salt Plans Layoffs
By Steve Bandy The Daily Iberian
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January 11, 2007
More than 50 employees at the Weeks Island plant of Morton Salt are expected to be laid off as Rohm and Haas, parent company, closes the evaporation unit there.
The announcement was made Tuesday that approximately nine salaried jobs and approximately 44 hourly jobs that support the unit will be eliminated.
Dan Schmit, the facility’s manager, said the potential job loss at the site was a result of market conditions. "While we hoped this day would never come, it is clear that market conditions will not support the continuation of the evaporation unit," Schmidt said. "We will make efforts to place workers in other positions within the salt business and elsewhere."
The company expects to end production at the evaporation unit by mid-year.
The layoffs will be phased in as operations at the evaporation unit are phased out, George V. Bochanski Jr., manager of organizational communications for Rohm and Haas, said.
For the salaried employees affected by the closure, the Rohm and Haas’ Employee Transition Program provides severance benefits.
For "bargaining unit" employees — unionized hourly employees — Rohm and Haas began the bargaining process with the union Tuesday, Bochanski said.
"This is something we were hoping wouldn’t happen," he said, "but the numbers kept falling."
Bochanski said production in the evaporation unit has dropped about 50 percent during the past four to five years.
The evaporation unit produced salt used in a variety of industries including seafood harvesting, meat processing and oil field production. The salt can be found in a variety of products, including seasoning blends and baked goods. It is planned at this time that the Weeks Island site will continue to service customers by serving as a distribution point for salt produced at other company locations.
Bochanski said it is not likely the evaporation unit will reopen at the Weeks Island site.
"Anything is possible, but we told our employees (Tuesday) that it’s very unlikely," he said Wednesday.
The layoffs will affect all production operations associated with the evaporation plant to some degree, according to a three-page "questions and answers" handout given to employees Tuesday. This includes, but is not limited to the panhouse, canline, bagging, warehouse and surface maintenance.
It is not anticipated that the rock salt mining operations at Weeks Island will be affected. However, it is anticipated that some support functions at the plant that currently support both the mining and the evaporation operations will be affected.
Company officials said there are no plans to close the Weeks Island mining operations, but they would not make any absolute guarantees about the future.
The entire Weeks Island facility currently employs about 210 workers.
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