Wells Fargo cuts 62 jobs in Durham

Wells Fargo announced that it is closing a mortgage processing center in Durham, a move that will eliminate 62 jobs.

The decision to close the Durham office and shift its operations to an existing mortgage processing center in Charlotte was triggered by a decline in refinanced mortgages, said company spokeswoman Christine Shaw.

The Durham office is part of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, a division of Wells Fargo Bank.

Last year San Francisco-based Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia after the Charlotte-based bank veered to the brink of insolvency, creating a bank with 6,650 U.S. branches, more than any other bank. But the Durham mortgage processing center was established by Well Fargo well before it acquired Wachovia.

The center's 62 employees are receiving a 60-day notice and will be given special consideration for filling jobs at Wells Fargo and Wachovia. Wells Fargo plans to switch the name of its Wachovia branches to Wells Fargo sometime next year.

Shaw said Wachovia is hiring additional workers at its branches in the Triangle this year to bring them up to the staffing of a typical Wells Fargo branch. The typical Wachovia branch has a dozen workers, two less than than Wells Fargo.

"This was a difficult decision to make," Shaw said of the consolidation. "Our team members are wonderful team members. We will work hard to see if we can find other opportunities for them in our company."

The Durham center processes loans arranged by outside mortgage brokers.

Source: News Observer

Stora Enso to layoff 1,100 workers

Stora Enso Oyj said that it will lay off up to 1,100 workers, cut production and close mills in Finland as the Nordic paper maker continues to struggle with dwindling revenue.

The announcement came four weeks after the company reported a second-quarter net loss of euro368 million ($523 million) and a 24-percent drop in net sales to euro2.2 billion.

Stora Enso said it will close a pulp mill by the end of the year and a sawmill in 2010. Also, cutbacks and reorganization at other mills will be made to save costs, it added.

Earlier this year, Stora forecast a weak third quarter and warned of layoffs, plant closures and production cuts.

Stora Enso is one of the world's largest forest product companies making magazine paper, newsprint, fine paper, pulp and packaging boards. The group has 29,000 employees.

Source: AP

Gerdau Ameristeel layoffs 300 employees

Gerdau Ameristeel has issued layoff notices to some 300 employees at its Sand Springs steel mill as it gets ready to either idle the plant for two years or shut it down permanently.

The company is weighing its options as it waits on an incentive package from the state of Oklahoma. But even if Gerdau decides to stay, it says it will need to shut down the plant for 24 months to make upgrades for meeting environmental regulations.

The layoffs will take effect no earlier than Oct. 16, Gerdau says.

Robert Bullard, vice president and general manager of the Sand Springs mill, confirmed the layoffs in a statement Tuesday.

The 60-day notices are required by federal law.

Gerdau announced in June that it would shut down the mill. It then decided to listen to offers from the state that might keep the plant economically viable.

Source: Tulsa World

Smithfield Foods subsidiary Premium Standard Farms layoffs 117 workers in Texas

A Smithfield Foods Inc. subsidiary will lay off 117 workers at its Texas hog farms, according to a filing with the state.

The layoffs, at Premium Standard Farms' sites in Dalhart, Texas, will begin by mid-October, the notice said.

Source: Hampton Roads

Onesteel cuts 1,240 jobs

Despite managing to avoid its first ever half-year loss and restarting some idled steel production, Onesteel has revealed it will slash its Australian workforce by an extra 1240 jobs as it strives to keep costs under control.

In an expectation-beating full-year profit report released yesterday, Onesteel, which had previously been silent on how much of its 11,000-strong workforce would be slashed under a plan announced in April, revealed the extent of the cuts.

The company said 840 directly employed staff had already been axed and that there were 400 more to go by the end of the calendar year.

They add to more than 1000 job losses announced earlier in the year.

Chief executive Geoff Plummer said the cuts, which were expected to save $160 million a year, were across all the company's operations.

If conditions improve and Onesteel's still-reduced operating output is ramped up, some staff will be brought back, but savings would be still be $100m a year, he said.

The Sydney-based steelmaker yesterday reported underlying full-year profit of $215m, which was down 32 per cent from last year but beat guidance of $200m.

Reported full-year profit, which included $24m from the sale of land and a trademark, fell 6 per cent to $230m.

Second-half profit came in at $2m, saving the company from an expected loss which would have been the first half-year loss since Onesteel was spun out of BHP in 2000.

"It has been if not the hardest year ever for international and Australian steel industry, then awfully close to it," Mr Plummer said yesterday.

He said the company was encouraged by recent improvements to the outlook but warned domestic market conditions in key segments continued to be challenging, with only modest improvements in activity levels expected in the near term.

Internationally, there were clear indications steel prices had bottomed and started to recover.

"Domestic steel prices fell significantly in the fourth quarter, but we believe prices have bottomed and will increase from here," Onesteel said.

Yesterday, Onesteel shares rose 12c to $3.10 on the better-than-expected profit. Onesteel said it had started to boost production at its steel mills, although they were still well below capacity.

Steelmaking at Whyalla in South Australia had been increased from a rate of 460,000 tonnes a year to 1.1 million tonnes, Onesteel said.

Production from electric arc furnaces in Sydney and at Laverton in Victoria was 240,000 tonnes in the second half, or about 35 per cent of capacity.

Onesteel said it would boost production to about 65 per cent of capacity in the first half of 2009-10.

Iron ore sales were on track for 6 million tonnes this year, most of which was expected to go to China, Onesteel said. About two-thirds of Onesteel's iron ore is currently being sold at spot prices, giving it access to higher-than-contracted prices.

Mr Plummer said Onesteel also planned to explore for copper, gold and uranium, as well as iron ore, on its South Australian exploration ground.

Source: The Australian News

Michael Page International plans for layoffs

Michael Page International Plc, the U.K.’s second-largest recruitment company, will reduce the number of job cuts it makes even as it enters a “challenging” third quarter.

“There will be some headcount that will have to come out but not a significantly large amount,” Chief Executive Officer Steve Ingham said in a telephone interview. “We can’t change the headcount for the sake of one holiday month.”

Michael Page will also post losses from some of the smaller countries in Europe that it operates in, rather than exit the locations, Ingham said. “If we were to reduce headcount further we would be closing offices or countries and we have no intention of doing that.”

The recruiter said today first-half profit more than halved as companies continued to cut jobs in the recession. The number of people seeking work in the U.K. in the three months through June rose 220,000 to 2.44 million, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Net income in the six months ended June 30 fell to 28.3 million pounds ($46.2 million), or 8.7 pence per share, from 58.9 million pounds, or 18 pence, a year earlier. Sales declined 27 percent to 364.7 million pounds, the London-based company said in a statement.

Source: Bloomberg

New Zealand's Transfield Services plans to cut 154 jobs

Contractor Transfield Services is proposing to make 154 staff redundant, saying it needed to adapt its telecommunications business to stay ahead of significant changes.

The move was revealed by the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) which said 125 of the redundancies involved field managers, designers and field staff throughout much of the country.

The EPMU said Transfield was a major contractor for Telecom and the redundancies showed Telecom's failure to properly fund the network.

In June Telecom's network access business Chorus announced it was awarding a 10-year contract worth about $1 billion to Transfield to carry out field force operations in several parts of the country.

But it also announced it was bringing in Australian company Visionstream in some areas, making it the third company doing the work, along with Transfield and Downer EDi Engineering.

The three 10-year contracts were worth a total of about $3 billion.

Today the EPMU said it would be fighting the Transfield redundancies, but also said the entire industry was being starved of cash as Telecom moved to squeeze profit from its operations.

That could be seen in the attempts by Visionstream to force workers into "dire" contracting arrangements, the EPMU said.

"The union is calling for the Government to step in now before it is too late for the skilled workforce and for New Zealand's vital telecommunications infrastructure."

EPMU national secretary Andrew Little said Telecom had an ongoing tactic of playing contractors off against each other to drive prices down.

"It's a model that's hurting our members and endangering the long term security of New Zealand's broadband," he said.

Source: NZ Herald

Samsung Austin Semiconductor plans to cut 550 jobs

Samsung Austin Semiconductor plans to cut 550 jobs from its Northeast Austin manufacturing operations starting on or about Oct. 18, according to a notice submitted by the company to the Texas Workforce Commission.

The company did not immediately provide a list of job categories affected.

Samsung has said that many of the job cuts would affect equipment operators at Fab 1, which will be shut down on or about Oct. 18. But spokesman Bill Cryer acknowledged that other job classifications, including engineers and technicians also will be affected.

Samsung informed workers of the impending shutdown of Fab 1 last Friday. The company expects to spend $500 million renovating and re-equipping the older chip factory to become a part of the newer Fab 2, which is inext door to Fab 1.

Fab 1 began producing chips in 1997. Fab 2, which is much larger and far more automated, started production in 2007.

Fab 2 makes flash memory chips used in smart phones, portable media players and other consumer devices.

When the renovation is complete, Samsung said it expects to hire 150 to 200 workers next year to work in the expanded Fab 2.

Source: Statesman

Vestas cuts 425 jobs in UK

Vestas, the Danish wind turbine company which last week shut two British plants with the loss of 425 jobs, unveiled a worst-than-expected drop in profits of more than a third.

The group, whose Isle of Wight factory was the scene of an 18-day sit-in by angry workers, revealed that pre-tax profits in the three months to the end of June dropped from €90 million at the same time last year to €59 million.

The group said its margins had been hit by severance payments to workers both in the UK and in Denmark, where it made 1,142 people redundant as well as a scaling-up of production in the US and China.

However, it stuck to its full-year sales and profits forecast with revenues of €7.2 billion and an operating profit margin of between 11 per cent and 13 per cent.

The Danish group found itself at the centre of a political storm after it announced plans to shut its Isle of Wight and Southampton factories.

Members of the Climate Rush campaign group chained themselves to the north London home of Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, in an "act of solidarity" for the workers about to lose their jobs.

They accused the Government of hypocriscy when, two weeks after announcing plans for a low-carbon Britain, Vestas was being forced to shut down because of an apparent lack of demand for wind turbines in Britain.

Vestas, which secured a court order to remove the protesting workers, said that demand was too low to justify continuing production in Britain.

In an interview today, Ditlev Engel, the chief executive of Vestas, said that while Northern Europe continued to pose a challenge, the group was now seeing a pick-up in business following the credit crunch. "We are seeing there is a pick-up in the market. We are seeing things moving again and there is life out there even though we cannot see it in the order backlog."

The group's order backlog at the end of the second quarter was €4 billion, although it has secured a further €700 million of orders since then.

Global government initiatives were beginning to take effect, the group said, while banks and financing institutions, which had pulled out of the market during the downturn, were returning to the sector.

Prices of a components had also peaked, it said, with no further price rises expected this year.

The credit crunch, the group said, had had a big impact on the industry, triggering falling orders as projects were shelved and seeing funding drop away.

Vestas claim of low demand in the UK was contradicted by a survey by the British Wind Energy Association. It found that Britain's countryside and coastline will be dotted with 2,700 new wind turbines by 2012 - more than double the existing total.

Source: Times UK Online

Teledyne Brown layoffs 130 employees

Rex Gevenden, President of Teledyne Brown, said the company has given 60 day layoff notices to 130 employees.

The possible cuts are at the company's "plant 2" near the intersection of Mooresville Road and Interstate 565.

Gevenden said the cuts are directly related to a slow-down in a Department of Energy Nuclear Enrichment project in Ohio.

Even though the initial notification is for 130 employees, the acutal cuts could be less.

"There's almost no question that there will be some layoffs. We just don't know the extent of it until we negotiate the terms of the suspension, and we ultimately know what our customer wants to happen during this period," said Gevenden.

He also said Teledyne Brown is working to relocate workers to other projects to lessen the impact of the cuts.

Source: WAFF

BAE Systems in Fridley layoffs 314 employees

Employees at BAE Systems in Fridley got word that 314 of them will lose their jobs because of the cancellation of U.S. Army contracts.

Nearly one in four employees will be laid off from the workforce of 1,319 people.

"These layoffs come as a result of the partial termination notice and stop-work orders the company received for its Future Combat Systems (FCS) manned ground vehicle program contracts," BAE spokeswoman Kelly Golden said Monday.

In recent years, BAE was among the defense contractors working on the next generation of combat equipment, and BAE employees were charged with the development of an artillery platform.

But the Pentagon recently directed the U.S. Army to restructure the FCS program. The Fridley facility was affected by an Army stop-work order for a "non-line-of-sight cannon,'' which a BAE official in 2006 said would provide soldiers with "an even more lethal, flexible and responsive fire support option." The firing platform featured a fully automated 155-millimeter howitzer.

However, President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Congress are conducting a broad review of defense spending priorities.

While BAE employees were absorbing the sobering news of the layoffs, President Obama was advocating the need to scrap costly programs that don't meet the needs of today's military. "Our troops and our taxpayers deserve better," Obama told the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention.

In early April, Gates recommended that the vehicle portion of the Future Combat Systems program needed to be redesigned. In his budget address, Gates said he thought the FCS program relied on low-weight vehicles that "do not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Source: Star Tribune

Ryanair layoffs 600 employees at Manchester airport

Low-cost airline Ryanair Plc said that it will cut most of its routes out of north England's Manchester Airport with the loss of up to 600 jobs.

The Dublin-based carrier said some of the routes will be switched to other airports in northern England.

It said it had decided to move away from Manchester Airport after a dispute over charges.

Source: Boston

New Flyer Industries cuts 320 jobs

New Flyer Industries Inc. said that it is cutting up to 320 jobs or about 13 per cent of its workforce after a major customer deferred an order of buses.

The heavy-duty transit bus maker said it would cut up to 270 jobs from its unionized workforce at plants in Winnipeg and Minnesota, plus up to 50 jobs from its salaried staff, mostly in Winnipeg.

New Flyer announced last month that the production of 140 diesel-electric hybrid articulated buses for a major U.S. customer was deferred indefinitely because of problems with funding.

Some of the job cuts will take place immediately, with the balance taking place over the rest of the year, the company said in a statement.

"Management has explored a variety of actions to mitigate the effects of this order deferral," New Flyer said.

"The company has not been advised by other customers of any other material funding issues nor has it received any other material firm order deferrals from any of its other customers."

In addition to the cuts, New Flyer said it will shut down its plants in Winnipeg and Crookston and St. Cloud, Minn., for the last two weeks of the year.

The announcement of the cuts came as the company reported a loss of $14.7 million or 31 cents per unit for the quarter ended July 5 compared with a loss of $10.7 million or 29 cents per unit a year ago.

Revenue in the quarter totalled $273.5 million, up from $260.4 million in the second quarter last year.

New Flyer's total order backlog including firm orders and options totalled $4 billion or about 9,425 equivalent units at July 5, up slightly from $4 billion or 9,236 equivalent units at the end of the previous quarter.

The firm order backlog totalled 2,388 equivalent units of production.

The expected revenue from the deferred order was approximately $122 million, about three per cent of the total order backlog.

New Flyer said the buyer has said the new buses are required under a bus replacement plan and that it intends to purchase the buses once funding is made available.

New Flyer employs about 2,500 workers in Canada and the United States.

Source: Canadian Press

Lockheed Martin Space Systems to layoff 800

Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., a major business area of the Lockheed Martin Corp., said that it will reduce about 800 employees or 4.5% of its overall workforce by the year-end in order to improve its competitive posture.

The company noted that the workforce reductions will impact all levels and disciplines, including technical, managerial, and administrative positions primarily at the Denver, Colo., and Sunnyvale, Calif. facilities.

The company said it will also offer a voluntary layoff plan designed to minimize the number of layoffs necessary.

Source: RTT News

Sovereign Bancorp layoffs 517 in Pennsylvania this year

Sovereign Bancorp has cut its Pennsylvania staff to 2,710, from 3,227 at the beginning of the year, confirmed spokesman Andrew Gully, a spokesman for the bank.

Cuts aren't just at the Boston bank's former Wyomissing and Philadelphia headquarters. It's "across the business lines," says Gully, spokesman for Sovereign, which is owned by Spain's Banco Santander. Nationally, Sovereign has slipped from 12,000 to just under 10,000 workers in eight states.

So 517 jobs gone in PA, some of them after the January 30 deal between the bank and dissident shareholder-employees. That deal says "Santander will not terminate and will not to permit Sovereign to terminate, except, in either case, for cause, the employment of any Sovereign employees employed by Sovereign in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania" until next year.

"People can take voluntary departures," Gully pointed out. "We'd like to reduce jobs. They get an enhanced severance package if they left."

How enhanced? Workers whose layoffs were announced before the settlement get severance pay based on time served. Others got "a year's worth of salary," plus severance, Donovan & Searles LLP partner Michael Donovan, who represented shareholders and employees vs. Sovereign, told me. Workers could stay a year, then leave. Or they could leave now, get a year's pay for staying home, and have that time to find another job, earning two incomes. Tough choice! Donovan says Sovereign's cuts conform with "both the spirit, and the letter," of the deal.

Sovereign, once the biggest bank based in eastern Pennsylvania, was bought by Santander for pennies on the dollar after rebel investors forced out longtime chief executive Jay S. Sidhu and ran the giant savings bank into the ditch. Sidhu now runs New Century Bank of Phoenixville, where he's in expansion mode, raising capital and hiring Sovereign veterans.

Sovereign is "finished" cutting, Sovereign's Gully told me. "Pennsylvania is still an important market for us. We'll be hiring."

Source: Philly

ABB layoffs 160 employees at Lake Mary plant

ABB Inc. will move its Lake Mary switchgear manufacturing operations to its new San Luis Potosi, Mexico, plant next year and start laying off up to 160 employees in a couple of months.

The 109,500-square-foot Lake Mary facility makes switchgears for Zurich-based ABB Inc. Switchgears are electrical protective devices comprised of fuses, disconnects and circuit breakers that prevent power outages and surges.

Currently, the facility employs 430 people who work with ABB’s switchgear customers globally. After the layoffs, the remaining 270 employees will consist of ABB’s switchgear customer service, administration and a smaller manufacturing staff.

“This is a strategic move by the company during a down period to consolidate our business and strengthen our market leadership,” said Bill Rose, spokesman for ABB

Source: Biz Journals

Analogic Corp cuts 6% of workforce

Analogic Corp. is cutting about 6 percent of its work force in Canton and Peabody and it has halved the size of its Copley Controls plant in Canton in an effort to save $5 million a year.

The Peabody-based high-tech manufacturer said it plans to cut 85 people out of its worldwide work force. The company plans to record a $2.1 million charge to account for severance payments and related costs.

Mark Namaroff, Analogic’s director of investor relations, said 58 affected people work in Massachusetts, where Analogic has facilities in Peabody and Canton. After the layoffs, Analogic will employ 881 people at the two locations.

Namaroff said Analogic vacated 51,000 square feet out of its roughly 100,000-square-foot Copley Controls plant on Dan Road in Canton last month and moved some operations to Peabody. He said the company uses the Canton plant to make motion control systems for the semiconductor and robotics industries and power amplifiers for MRI machines.

Analogic acquired the Canton operations last year as part of its nearly $70 million acquisition of Copley. But Analogic doesn’t own the building, and it will record a charge of $1 million to make ongoing lease payments through the lease’s expiration at the end of 2011. Namaroff said Analogic will try to sublease the half of the property that it no longer uses.

Source: Wicked Local