DuPont To Lay Off 25% Of Delaware Workforce

The cuts keep coming, and this one is going to hurt as DuPont lays off  25% of their Delaware workforce according to this dinosaur media report.

DuPont will eliminate about 1,700 jobs in Delaware by early 2016.
CEO Ed Breen announced the layoffs in a memo sent to DuPont’s roughly 6,100 Delaware employees on Tuesday – just four days after Christmas.
Several hundred of those DuPont employees will receive notice in January that their jobs, while others were notified earlier this month. DuPont officials declined to say how many workers still have yet to be notified their job is being eliminated.
All 1,700 workers are expected to be let go by the end of March.
Breen said he chose to announce the full scope of the job cuts now – even before many employees have received a pink slip – because DuPont is required to detail the layoffs in a state filing due by Dec. 31. That notice is required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which demands that employers give 30-days notice of a mass layoff that do not result from a plant closing.
“Especially given that we are in the middle of the holidays, we would have preferred to wait until individual notifications were complete before reporting the full local impact,” Breen wrote in the memo. “… I wanted you to hear the difficult news – directly from me …”
Although DuPont will eliminate more than 1 in 4 of its remaining positions in Delaware, the company is not expected to shutter any of its local properties, company officials said. Those facilities include DuPont’s Chestnut Run Plaza headquarters, where about 3,000 employees now work, the Experimental Station in Alapocas with about 2,500 workers or the Stine Haskell Research Center, near Newark, which has about 600 employees.
DuPont officials declined Tuesday to say how many jobs would be cut from those specific facilities.
Each Delaware worker laid off by DuPont will receive a separation package, career placement services and training allowances based on years of services, company officials said.
The impeding job cuts are part of DuPont’s $700 million global cost savings and restructuring plan announced Dec. 11. That restructuring already has resulted in jobs cuts, consolidated divisions and and halted projects.
DuPont ultimately hopes to eliminate 5,000 positions worldwide, 10 percent of its global workforce, in an effort to slash $1.6 billion from its budget by 2017. The company has approximately 54,000 employees worldwide.
Most of those layoffs are expected to occur ahead of DuPont’s proposed merger with Dow Chemical Co., slated for completion sometime in 2016. Under the merger, Dow and DuPont would form DowDuPont, a $130-billion behemoth, and then separate into three independent companies: agriculture and chemicals, material sciences and specialty products.
“DuPont’s announcement today is deeply disappointing, especially to the thousands of Delawareans who helped this company grow and succeed for generations,” Gov. Jack Markell said in a statement. “DuPont’s number one asset is its people, and the innovations that the company has produced during its storied history are a testament to the quality of those people. For those affected by today’s announcement, they should know that the State will do all that it can in the coming months to assist them as they evaluate new opportunities.”
DuPont on Tuesday also announced plans to locate its post-merger specialty products business in Delaware, although an exact location has not yet been determined. That business will include several current DuPont business units, such as nutrition and health, industrial biosciences, safety and protection, and electronics and communications, along with Dow’s electronic materials business.
“I am pleased that DuPont has committed to basing its Specialty Products business here,” Markell said. “We look forward to doing all that we can to promote the success of that business and will continue to urge DuPont and Dow to see the value of locating other businesses here in Delaware where they have grown and succeeded in the past.”
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