Dow Chemical announced last week that it will cut 5,000 jobs worldwide, but the company’s St. Charles plant won’t find out how many of those jobs – if any – will be slashed from its plant until January.
The 5,000 employees that will be cut account for about 11 percent of Dow’s global work force. The St. Charles plant has 1,100 Dow employees and 1,000 contractors.
“We just don’t know how many, or if any of those jobs will be cut from our plant, but we should know more in the first two weeks of January,” Dow Spokesperson Tommy Faucheux said. “Dow is in the process of evaluating its businesses and they will look at each one and make decisions from there.”
Should Dow decide that jobs need to be cut from the St. Charles plant, Faucheux doesn’t think it will be a large percentage of the work force.
“I don’t think we would have a lot of jobs cut here,” Faucheux said. “But we just won’t know for sure until they make that decision.”
Dow also announced last week that it would close 20 plants and several businesses to reign in costs because of the economic recession.
“The good news is that none of those units are at our plant,” Faucheux said. “Of course, because of the state of the economy, that’s something Dow will continue to monitor.”
Dow St. Charles has not had to cancel any upcoming expansion projects, because there weren’t really any planned for this year.
“We just finished a couple major expansion projects and didn’t really have any scheduled soon, so the economy hasn’t really been a factor in that regard,” Faucheux said.
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