ENFIELD — All but 18 of Hallmark Cards Inc.’s remaining 552 workers will be out of work by the end of June, as the company winds down operations at its 25 Bacon Road warehouse, the company said this week.
By the end only three people will remain on staff for an undetermined period, company officials said in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice filed Tuesday with the state Labor Department.Â
One of those three will be an information technology employee, who will continue performing duties for some period after the facility closes, the company said.
The other two employees are on short-term disability leave, Hallmark Human Resources Director Haylee Kelley said. They will be given new termination dates once they are released to return to work or are no longer eligible for disability benefits, Kelley said.
Hallmark, based in Kansas City, Missouri, announced last July that it would shut its Enfield distribution center by mid-2016.
Layoffs at the warehouse started last December with 18 employees. Hallmark officials had said six workers accepted transfers to its Liberty, Missouri, distribution center, where Hallmark plans to shift the work now done in Enfield.
The company has said laid-off workers will receive two weeks of severance pay for each year of employment, up to a maximum of 52 weeks. Employees also may use part or all of the severance pay for up to four months of continued medical insurance coverage.
At its high point, the company occupied a combined 1.65 million square feet of warehouse space in Enfield. As recently as 2007, the company’s operations in town included two buildings with as many as 800 employees. The company closed one distribution center at 35 Manning Road that year and moved the 350 workers there to the Bacon Road operation.
Hallmark, which has been cutting its payroll in recent years, opened its first distribution center in Enfield in 1952, a 75,000-square-foot building on Central Street. That was replaced in 1961 by a larger center on Manning Road, which itself was enlarged with the addition of a two-story warehouse in 1967.
The company in 1980 opened its second building on Bacon Road.
