Rayloc, which has a plant in Morganfield, has announced a major companywide layoff that will affect as many as 480 workers at its Union County facility.
Company officials told employees Thursday that the layoff would take effect within the next three months. Kevin Sheilley, executive director of Northwest Kentucky Forward, said to his understanding, the plant will transform in mid- to late-October from primarily a manufacturing facility to a distribution center, retaining about 60 of its current workers.
Despite the recent closure of Rayloc facilities in Texas and Maryland, Sheilley said the announcement of the western Kentucky closure came as a shock.
"We felt positive about the plant's ability to remain competitive," director of the Henderson-based regional economic development agency said.
"This facility has been an outstanding operation for the company as demonstrated by their recent implementation of their highly efficient cell production system," Sheilley added in a statement on the closure made available on Northwest Kentucky Forward's Web site.
The Morganfield plant, in fact, had taken over many of the lines from the plants shut down in Texas and Maryland, according to Sheilley. Rayloc, a unity of Genuine Parts Co., Inc., remanufactures auto parts for NAPA Auto Parts, its sister company under the GPC umbrella.
Sheilley, en route to Morganfield Thursday afternoon, added that Rayloc appears to be moving more from manufacturing to distribution of auto parts.
Some employees, as many as 75 to 100 from Crittenden County, say there were offered severance packages. Sheilley said a silver lining in Rayloc cloud is that in the next 12 to 18 months, several hundred jobs will be coming online in Union County. About 600 jobs alone are anticipated by 2010 at Alliance Resources Partners' planned River View coal mine.
"Rayloc employees have an excellent reputation," Sheilley said of opportunities for the company's unemployed workers.
According to Herald-Mail.com, an online newspaper for Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the 260 workers at the recently-closed plant in Hancock, Md., qualified for federal assistance after the facility was certified as a Trade Act-related closure. Those benefits are intended for workers who lose their jobs due to increased imports.
It is too early, Sheilley said, to attribute the Morganfield closure to jobs headed overseas or increased imports.
