Posted on 07/27/2004 3:46:09 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
WILMINGTON As the printed circuit-board industry continues its move overseas, nearly 500 employees of Sanmina-SCI Corp.'s Wilmington plant began looking for jobs last week.
Company officials announced the plant's closing to workers on Thursday, giving the 490 employees the two months notice required by law. The plant will be shut down by Sept. 20.
Carmine Renzulli, senior vice president of legal and human resources for San Jose, Calif.-based Sanmina, said there is no longer enough work to support the Wilmington operations. Since 1998, the company has also closed plants in Hudson and Derry, N.H., and at Ward Hill in Haverhill.
"It's been losing money for a couple of years. The work isn't there anymore," Renzulli said.
Sanmina is a contract manufacturer, meaning it provides manufacturing services for other companies. Sanmina makes sophisticated electronics components, including printed circuit boards and backplane assemblies circuit boards with slots and sockets for plugging in other boards and cables.
The company is publicly held, with its stock trading on Nasdaq. Sales for its latest fiscal year, which ended last September, were more than $10.3 billion.
Sanmina acquired the Wilmington plant in 1998 when it bought Altron Inc., a circuit-board manufacturer that first opened in Woburn 1970 and once employed almost 1,000 people.
More than 75 percent of Sanmina's local employees are laborers. One group, from Peabody, carpools by commuting together on a small bus.
"We have whole families who work here," said one employee as he was leaving work yesterday afternoon, and who asked not to be named. Many of the company's employees have worked there for more than 10 years, he said.
"Now they're wondering how to pay their mortgages and support their kids," he said.
But for some, morale is not as low as one might expect. After coming to work every day for two years expecting to be laid off at any moment, many workers were actually relieved, the employee said.
Federal grants for retraining will likely be offered. Sanmina's information technology department has set up computers with Internet access and printers for workers who don't have it at home and need to write resumes and search for jobs online. Even fellow employees are sharing news of job opportunities with each other, the worker said.
But few were surprised to hear plans of the plant closing. During its third-quarter earnings announcement last week, the company outlined a strategy to "leverage our expanding capacity and technical capabilities in more cost-efficient regions, such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia," including the acquisition of a 400,000-square-foot printed circuit board plant in China a building twice the size of the Wilmington plant.
The news came despite improved financial performance. In the nine months ending in June, Sanmina reported sales of $8.9 billion, about 17 percent higher than the comparable year-ago period. It had posted a net loss of $16.7 million, down from $51.5 million a year previous.
In 2000, two years after Sanmina acquired Altron, it bought Altron's chief competitor in the region, Salem, N.H.-based Hadco Corp., for $1.1 billion. But by September 2001, more than 500 regional Sanmina employees were laid off. And in October 2002, the Derry plant closed, leaving 450 more people out of work.
Sanmina still maintains more than 75 offices worldwide, including two contract manufacturing plants in Woburn and Manchester, N.H.
Work done at the Wilmington plant will be moved partially to a Sanmina plant in Oswego, N.Y., with the rest going overseas, Renzulli said.
Rebecca Lipchitz's e-mail address is rlipchitz@lowellsun.com .
Look on the bright side, this is great news for the Chinese. /sarcasm
Surely there must be an occassional plant hiring or business opening you could bring to our attention.
this will make Americans work more harder and be competitive in the new world order. I think.
Perhaps those workers should buy lottery tickets to supplement their incomes!
But those aren't covered by the reporters at "Doom and Gloom Daily News". (I think willie's got a lifetime subscription with a live net feed.)
I don't know why you're making such a big deal of this closure: the streets of Lowell always need more meth/crack dealers. These people will be able to find a job in no time flat.
I'm always amazed at how many people criticize Willie Green for not doing the things they can't, won't or refuse to do for themselves.
The printed circuit board production business involves very dangerous chemicals for etching and plating and has been decimated by environmental laws going back at least 10 years. But not to worry..Taiwan has picked up the slack. I suppose our trial lawyers could move to Taiwan and try to destroy them there?
BOEING is hiring up to 11,000, with 3,000 right here in Washington. We in Washington have always been the last to feel a recovery. Beleive me "we feel it and it feels goooood.
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