OLEAN, N.Y. — No one working in the shop at Olean Advanced Products knows when the axe will fall.
Officials with the electronic-component plant at 1695 Seneca Ave. said last April operations would stop in early 2017 in a corporate consolidation by parent company AVX. The new year is here, and more than 80 employees continue working and waiting for that call with no clue if they’ll get severance packages, according to union President Vicky Irons, who works in quality control there.
“We’re just going crazy because we don’t know from one day to the next,” said Irons, of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local 1690, which represents about 60 AVX employees with anywhere from “16 to 50 years” of service. “I don’t know if one day I’m going to go there and there’s going to be locks on the gates. … It’s an uncertainty. I don’t know if after the first of the year we’ll go in and they’ll have some more news for us.”
Upper management in Olean and corporate officials in Fountain Inn, S.C., have yet to publicly explain the path forward.
“At this point there’s no update,” said plant manager John Monahan. Reached for comment late last week, he deferred to the multinational corporation’s headquarters. A phone call placed by the Times Herald to AVX Chief Financial Officer Kurt Cummings and an email to his assistant before Christmas were not returned by Friday.
Also as of Friday, the state Department of Labor Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification website, which gives early warnings of closings and layoffs, did not include an AVX listing. Workers did qualify for the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act and its free training and temporary benefits, Irons said.
Meanwhile, employees continue putting in “10-, 12-hour days” as client anticipation of the facility closing has yielded an influx of orders, said Irons, who is approaching 39 years at the plant. Those who are older, but with some years left before retirement, fear the unemployment line and interview processes for jobs elsewhere, she said.
While company officials recently honored three 50-year employees with a dinner and “$6,000 Rolex watches,” Irons said, they’ve yet to discuss severance pay with the workforce.
“Everybody’s pretty worked up still. We just go in and do our jobs every day,” she added. “They just put up a notice that in February they’re going to hold some classes at (Jamestown Community College) for learning to interview and those basic kinds of things. They’re having 401k people and pension people come in January.”
In a phone interview in April, Monahan said he began at Olean Advanced Products about 25 years ago when its workforce numbered roughly 850. Steady and incremental downsizing brought the facility to its current population, he said, noting, “It was just a matter of time before it happened.”
“We’re not just co-workers, we’re friends. I know it’s difficult for him,” Irons said of Monahan. “It’s not his fault. This has been coming for quite some time, and it’s just the way it is. He just happens to be in charge of this time.”
AVX will shift Olean’s operations to its headquarters in South Carolina. The electronic-component company — which features dozens of facilities across North America, South America, Europe and Asia — serves numerous markets, including computers, telecommunications infrastructure, cellular, industrial, automotive, consumer, military and medical, according to its website.
Specifically, front-end jobs from Olean would be absorbed into the headquarters, Monahan earlier explained. Those duties include manufacturing ceramics and metals for electrical capacitors. Units made in Olean are then shipped to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and San Salvador, El Salvador, for finishing operations, he said.
AVX has a partnership with Kyocera Corp. of Japan.
“We are a money-making factory here in the Olean facility,” Irons said. “A lot of the people that order from us, they only want their work done in Olean because we are long-term people there. Our craft is just bar-none to any of the other places. That’s why we have so much work, because people are trying to stockpile because they know we’re leaving.”
AVX stock closed at $15.63 a share Friday. Values trended upward for most of 2016, from a 52-week low of $10.43 in January to a high of $16.07 this month. Its market capitalization, which is the total market value of all of its outstanding shares, is now about $2.63 billion, more than a half-billion dollars more than in April.
“I keep thinking maybe they’ve had a change of heart, but it’s just me wishful thinking,” Irons said.
