JEFFERSONVILLE — When the roughly 100 Jeffboat employees scheduled Friday went to an informal meeting between shifts, they were put on notice the shipyard is closing.
“We knew something was going to happen,” Kevin Tanner, a lead painter with 20 years experience with Jeffboat, said of the Friday meeting. “I don’t think the majority thought it was going to close.”
He said the meeting, announced informally through a Facebook post, was a short one, with pretty much one goal — to inform the employees of the imminent closure of the shipyard within the next two months.
JeffBoat is the nation’s largest inland shipyard, according to the company’s website. It spans 80 acres on the banks of the Ohio River in Jeffersonville.
Tanner said Jeffboat vice president Mike Poindexter first gave a short history of the company, which goes back 80 years. He tried to make the mood lighter with a joke, which fell flat with the employees learning the time they’d spent on their careers had come to a close, Tanner said.
Poindexter told the employees — about 70 percent of the 160 left — that the company would be closing due to the “over-building in the industry and the lack of needing barges, and the overhead,” that the company would be shutting down permanently by the end of April or mid-May, Tanner said.
“He started to get choked up and said his emotions were running high,” Tanner said of Poindexter, “and said he would not answer any questions.
“One man decided to say ‘thank you for telling us the truth,’ and we all walked away from the meeting and kind of milled around the yard until 3:30.”
A statement issued Saturday afternoon via Facebook from the Teamsters Local 89 confirmed the closure.
“It is with heavy hearts that we confirm that Jeff-Boat, the nation’s largest inland shipbuilder and one of Local 89’s oldest companies, is shutting down,” it reads, in part. It also included words of some current and former JeffBoat employees.
“The loss of these jobs is devastating but experienced and highly trained Union Sisters and Brothers always prevail in the end. We dust ourselves off, pick up the pieces and we move on to our next adventure,” said Teamsters Local 89 business agent and recording secretary Jeff Cooper, a former worker at JeffBoat, according to the statement.
“In the near future we will be meeting with the employer to bargain the effects of the closure with the goal of securing all the right and benefits that they are entitled to and help transition our membership onto their next adventure.”
Jim Kincaid, business agent and former worker said they will work hard to help their fellow workers find employment.
“We are going to do everything in our power to find these brothers and sisters other jobs and help them to pick up the pieces,” Kincaid, said, according to the statement. “They are good, hard-working folks. They will be an asset to anybody who hires them in the future.”
A call to Poindexter was not immediately returned today, and Jeffersonville Mayor Mike Moore said he hadn’t received any notification from the company on the closure.
“Well, I don’t think that I was ever led to believe that it was happening,” Moore told the News and Tribune.
He said there had been an earlier break in the shipyard’s history, when it closed for several years in the 1980s. Moore said he expects that could be the case this time, too. He said if it is, he anticipates that another company would come in and do the same type of work.
“If this is true and they have announced this closing, I still anticipate some other company is going to probably come in there and do the same type of work,” he said. “The land really can’t be used for much of anything else.”
He added that the loss of employment is concerning, but he hopes that can change. Moore has been in talks recently with a company interested in Jeffersonville, which would potentially employ welders who have been or are being displaced by the closure of JeffBoat.
At a news conference Saturday afternoon, Moore spoke of the importance of the company in the city’s history — in the 1940s, it employed around 13,000.
“It’s what built the city of Jeffersonville,” he said. “JeffBoat is probably one of the most recognized figures in the city. There have been rumors going around for the last several months ... it’s a sad day.”
But he urged those being displaced to stay strong, and that if these jobs will be going away, there is not a shortage of employment options in Jeffersonville.
“Don’t give up hope,” he said. “We’re still a community that is prospering — we’re just doing it in a different way.”
The union representing workers, Teamsters local 89, was recently preparing for contract negotiations with the company, said Tanner, who is a union steward and on that committee. The current five-year contract is set to expire April 1.
The committee’s job was to work to reach a deal on a new three-year contract, if the company was staying open, or an exit plan, if closing. He said the union submitted a contract proposal about three weeks ago, and since there hadn’t yet been a meeting, he knew something was up.
Over the past year, as the company announced more layoffs, morale has been low around the Market Street business, Tanner said. Getting the news Friday confirmed what a lot of workers have been expecting could happen — the loss of employment.
“The past year’s been rough,” he said, adding that a lot of people have quit or been fired, and absenteeism and lower quality work have resulted. There have been times when work had to be redone because it wasn’t done right the first time. Still, the supervisors acted as though business was as usual.
“You go in every day and it’s like you have something sitting on your chest,” he said, adding that they usually found out about rounds of layoffs from news reports before they were notified by their employer.
Tanner said the mood of the meeting was “shock,” and afterward some people went ahead and turned in their resignation. Second shift, which was scheduled to start soon after the Friday meeting, was canceled, as were weekend shifts.
Workers are expected to be back at work Monday. Tanner said he’ll be there, and will stay and do his job unless he finds another one before the closure. But he doesn’t know how it will go.
“At this point, I do not know what will happen [today],” he said. “Right now, there are 160 people who don’t care. We have no future [at JeffBoat.]”