Thursday, December 13, 2007

Valley’s WestPoint home plant to close

July 31, 2007

More West Point Home employees will soon be out of work.

About 300 employees at the company’s Joseph L. Lanier Plant in Valley have been given a 60-day notice that their plant will shut down operations by Sept. 31.

But employees of the plant said the announcement wasn’t a surprise.

Olin Norwood, who has worked at the company for about 33 years, said there had been rumors.

“Everybody’s taking it about the same,“ he said Monday afternoon. “They’ve been looking for it anyway. They’ve been hearing it, so now they announced it. It ain’t no big deal now.“

The same seems to hold true for the community as well.

“People I’ve talked to say this isn’t going to be the last of it,“ said Valley’s Planning and Development Director Allen Hendrix.

Hendrix knows the impact of such announcements first hand. He worked for the company for about 28 years in the Service Center, before that operation was closed in 1993.

“It was a shock back then, because it was one of the first,“ he said. But he said he was lucky. “I left work there on Friday and went to work for the city on Monday.“

But attitudes have changed now, he added.

“Today I think everybody has kind of settled in,“ he said. “They know it’s coming.“

On Monday, company spokesperson Carolyn D’Angelo said the Lanier closing is part of the same “global restructuring” efforts the company cited when it announced the other closings earlier this year.

In May, the company announced it would be closing locations in three states, including the Opelika Finishing Plant and the Abbeville Fabrication Plant in Alabama, the Marianna Plant in Florida and the Grifftex and Graphics plants in Georgia. Those plants are scheduled to close by Aug. 31, affecting about 1,000 workers. At the time of that announcement several workers at the Opelika plant had a similar response citing rumors before the formal announcement. Some even said they’d already been looking for a new job.

Now, several families in the Valley area are experiencing the same.

“It’s very sad to us because we have had family involved,“ said resident Elizabeth Hudmon. Her son, Mark, works as a department manager at the Lanier plant.

But they are hopeful.

“We hope that Kia coming is going to provide a better future for our families and friends,“ she said. “We wish everything could have stayed, but you have to have change - change is the name of the game and Valley is growing. We’re just sad about everybody that’s going to be losing their jobs.“

D’Angelo said the company’s other Valley operations, including the Carter Plant, are not included in the latest closings.

Reporters Erin Bock and Brendon Anderson contributed to this story.