Peggy Vlerebome, Madison Courier Staff Writer
Armor Metal Group is permanently closing its Madison plant, putting about 90 people out of jobs as the work they did is moved to Mason, Ohio.
The closing, which will take place over the next six months, was announced to employees Wednesday morning.
The Madison plant, a division of Cincinnati-based Armor Metal Group, makes shipping and storage containers, racks and other kinds of equipment, with most of the work under contract with the federal government and the military. Its products have included boxes for shipping engines, rockets and munitions to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There has been a downturn in business since early 2006, and as a result Armor has had several layoffs during the past two and a half years, the company said in a press release announcing the closure.
"Government work in particular is just up and down," said Linda Jayne, vice president for administration at Armor Metal Group. Armor bought Williamson Metals eight years ago; Armor officials checked sales records from before its ownership and saw the same up-and-down pattern, she said.
The company will be phased out over the next six months, and some employees might be there longer as Armor completes contract work. The 155,000-square-foot building on 30 acres at Clifty Drive and State Road 7 will be listed for sale soon, she said.
Employees met Wednesday afternoon with Richard Dyrdahl, an international organizer for Sheet Metal Workers International Association, a union that represents Armor workers in Madison. Armor's plant in Mason, Ohio, does not have a union.
Dyrdahl and Jayne said the company and the union are negotiating a severance package for the employees. Dyrdahl said he didn't know about the plant closing until he went to an already scheduled meeting with Armor officials Wednesday in Madison.
Workers were caught off-guard too.
"I needed two years," Russell Tingle, a press operator, said with a groan in his voice. He would have had enough years to retire in two years with 40 years of service. He went to work Sept. 27, 1971.
"We been through some pretty ugly times," he said, citing 1992 when employees found the gates padlocked. The bank put the locks on the gates until financial issues were straightened out the next day, he and other workers said.
But nothing compared to the news about closing, he said.
Tingle is among a handful of workers who have close to 40 years on the job.
"I've never worked at anyplace else," David Bruce said as he left the union meeting Wednesday afternoon. He went to work at 1200 Clifty Drive in 1972 right out of high school when it was still Williamson Co., which for years made furnaces before Armor bought it in 1999. "I've been laid off before, but not like this where there won't be no company."
He does tooling at Armor. He does a lot of welding, so he might go back to school to specialize in it - but he knows welders who are out of jobs, too.
Armor officials who met with employees to tell them about the closing said they can apply for jobs in Mason, which is northeast of Cincinnati, 100 miles from Madison. Bruce lives in Chelsea and doubts he will apply because of the distance.
Armor's closing has been rumored for years. "They've been closing ever since I came to work there," Bruce said. But still he was "kind of surprised."
The state of Ohio gave Armor Metal Group financial incentives a month ago to retain 192 jobs and add 110 new jobs in Mason. The incentives will be used to expand the Mason plant to accommodate the work moved from Madison, Jayne said. Some of the work done in Madison will be moved to Mason, but it's possible that not all of it will be, she said. The company will be deciding whether to stop making some things.
Ohio gave Armor Metal a $60,000 grant to buy machinery and equipment as part of a $2.3 million renovation of its Mason plant. Armor Metal Group also received a 45 percent tax credit for creating jobs in Mason. The tax credit will be worth $338,000 to the company over the next six years. One requirement of the tax credit is that the company stay in the same location for 12 years, according to the announcement of the incentives in December.
The most recent Armor layoffs were in December, when about a dozen people were let go, said Corey Murphy, executive director of Economic Development Partners of Jefferson County. He and Mayor Tim Armstrong said they contacted Armor officials as soon as they learned about the layoffs. They said Wednesday that they and the Indiana Economic Development Corp. put together a package of incentives to offer to Armor to keep it in Madison, but Armor never responded to it. They didn't detail the incentives but said it was a good package.
"The goal of the incentive package was to maintain and possibly grow the work being produced out of this plant," Murphy said.
He said he also tried to find new markets for Armor products, including introducing Armor officials to a company owner who could be a potential client, but a relationship never developed.
Murphy and Armstrong said that when they contacted Armor in December, the company said officials would come to Madison on Jan. 7 to meet with them.
When Armor officials arrived for the meeting Wednesday, they told Armstrong and Murphy of the closure. Murphy said he was not totally surprised because he had visited Armor, as he visits the other businesses in town, as part of Economic Development Partners' new B.R.E.V. program - Business Retention Expansion and Visitation.
Armstrong said the repeated layoffs were an indicator that things were not going well at Armor, so he also was not surprised by the news.
"It's still a shock," Armstrong said. "It's a hard hit for our community. ... It's a hurt to the community and the work force. I don't think it's anyone's fault.
"It's something you don't want to see," Armstrong said. "We can't change the economy right now ... but we want to do all we can to put out the effort to keep the jobs here."
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