A multinational Fortune 500 company which provides a range of engineering services plans to lay off dozens at its Charlottesville-area facility.
St. Louis-based Emerson Electric has announced plans to lay off 87 workers at its 2500 Austin Drive facility off U.S. 29 north of the city. The move is part of a larger plan to cease all manufacturing at the site which produces programmable logic controllers, the components in control systems used to operate machinery.
Employees were notified June 26 of the cuts, which will go into effect at the end of the year, according to an Emerson spokesman.
“This difficult decision is no reflection on the quality of the employees who have served our customers and the company well over the years,” the company said in a prepared statement delivered to The Daily Progress. “This is a business decision based on Emerson’s review of operations to manage costs, maintain competitiveness and provide the best possible service to our customers. ”
More than 100 people will remain employed at the Charlottesville facility as it transitions to “an engineering and technology center” for the company’s programmable logic controllers business.
“The impacted workers will receive severance packages based on their years of service,” according to the company statement.
Emerson, now in its 135th year, operates more than 170 facilities worldwide and employs more than 86,700 people. Once manufacturing ceases there, Emerson’s Charlottesville-area location will remain one of the company’s 24 regional training centers in the U.S.
Over the next two years, the company plans to roll back manufacturing across the company, outsourcing production to third-party vendors in order to “streamline its portfolio.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com