Despite having just posted a solid year of sales and operating profits, East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney plans to cut 150 hourly workers from its payrolls through buyouts and layoffs by Monday, company and union officials said today.
The job-cut announcement comes only a day after Pratt parent United Technologies Corp. warned that more job cuts are in the offing at its subsidiaries, but did not specify where or when they would occur,
The bulk of the latest Pratt cuts, around 88, will be at the company’s flagship East Hartford plant, according to James Parent, assistant directing labor representative for the Machinists union’s District 26. Parent said eligible workers 55 and older have only until Friday to apply for a buyout package. If insufficient numbers opt for the voluntary separation package, layoffs will be announced on Monday, he said.
According to Pratt spokesman Matthew Perra, most of the remaining 62 job cuts will be mostly at Pratt’s North Berwick, Maine plant, where around 50 hourly workers are being offered the buyout, with only a dozen or so at its Cheshire plant. Pratt’s Middletown assembly plant will escape this round of job cuts, according to Perra.
“On Friday, Pratt & Whitney notified our hourly work force and union officials that due to a reduction in manufacturing and service volumes for 2009, the company is offering a voluntary separation option to hourly employees,” he said in a company statement.
“In response to global economic conditions and the impact on the aerospace industry, we continue to reduce costs in order to remain competitive in a challenging economic environment,” Perra said.
“We will continue to closely monitor our business needs and – depending on the number of employees who take advantage of the voluntary separation offer – we will determine if involuntary reductions will be necessary,” he said.
Hourly employees 55 and older have been offered a buyout that includes a one-time payment of $5,000, one week of pay for each year of employment, a 12 month extension of healthcare benefits, and a 12 month continuation of UTC employee scholar benefits, which underwrite higher education classes, according to Perra and Parent.
Boosted by such cost-cutting measures over the past year, Hartford-based UTC posted a 7.5 percent increase in net profits for the fourth quarter of 2008 and an 11.9 percent jump in net profits for the full fiscal year in a financial report filed Wednesday.
Still, UTC officials said there will be more layoffs through the first three months of 2009, but did not disclose which subsidiaries would be targeted.
“We aggressively continue to reduce our costs and restructure our businesses,” UTC President and Chief Executive Officer Louis Chenevert said Wednesday, alluding to job cuts that have struck several UTC subsidiaries in recent months. One of the largest was at Pratt where 350 salaried workers received pink slips in December.
Around 280 of the salaried job cuts were at Connecticut plants in East Hartford, Middletown, and Cheshire, with the remainder out of state.
There are 12,000 workers, salaried and hourly together, at Pratt’s Connecticut operations.
Parent stressed today that Pratt remains a profitable part of UTC, but the union has been told that its business is being affected by production slowdowns at its two major customers, Chicago-based Boeing Co. and Europe’s Airbus Industrie.
