Philip D. Brown

Richmond County Daily Journal

The plastic packaging plant owned by Rexam on County Home Road in Hamlet will shut down operations in the first quarter of 2010, according to a corporate spokesman, leaving 220 Richmond County workers without a job.

Greg Brooke of Rexam Americas said the company will close the Hamlet production facility at that time and move the equipment.

Workers were informed at 7 a.m. Thursday, according to Local Chapter 256 of the International Glass Molders and Plastics Union President Hortie McLaughlin.

In a statement, a corporate spokesman said the move would shore up the rest of the company’s national and international operations.

“Aligning our manufacturing capabilities across our global plastics business is part of our strategy to deliver operational excellence,” said Rexam Plastic Packaging Group Director Graham Chipchase. “It allows us to improve the overall utilization of our existing operations, balance capacity and demand and continue our focus on delivering world-class quality products and services to our customers.”

The company has operations in more than 20 countries, but the overall health of the multi-national group is little solace for employees who will be let go in a county that has above 14 percent unemployment, McLaughlin said.

“Everybody’s startled, everybody’s hurt,” she said Thursday. “They are upset. The economy’s bad, and many feel like there’s nothing here for them, but some have said this is their opportunity to go back to school.”

McLaughlin explained she has worked at the plant since August 1983, about six months after it opened, and she is now of retirement age so her “well-being is taken care of.”

“My heart really goes out to my work family, though,” she said. “So many of them have small kids, and we have some husbands and wives who work here, which means everybody in the house will be out of work.”

McLaughlin said the workers had known for months that the corporation would make a decision between two of its American plants, and held out hope the Hamlet facility would be chosen to stay open.

“Luckily for us, we are unionized and we do have a contract, which means there are certain legalities the company has to live up to,” she said. “As opposed to working somewhere where they could just lock the doors.”

She said she and other union members met with corporate representatives Thursday morning to begin to hash out a deal for severance packages.

“They informed us they had no intentions of not honoring our contracts, and that is one of their obligations, to provide severance pay,” McLaughlin said. “The talks were very peaceful this morning, and we’ll be meeting again with them next week when our international representative will be here, and we should know more then.”

She said the union has been in contact with the North Carolina Employment Security Office, and it is still unknown whether the workers will qualify as “displaced” under federal guidelines.

“They are telling us that the machinery is being sent to other plants in the United States, though,” McLaughlin said. “So it appears we may not.”

“We sent out a Rapid Response Team to the plant on September 24, 25 and 27,” Employment Security Commission Local Office Manager Judy Carpenter said. “We talked to them about unemployment insurance benefits and opportunities to retrain in other fields, for instance through the JobsNOW program at the community college.”

She explained the state has to be contacted if over 50 percent of the workforce is involved in a round of lay-offs.