Friday's layoff of 102 employees at a Lawrence fertilizer plant is unjust, unfair and unwarranted, a union leader said.
More than 100 employees of Farmland Industries Inc.'s Lawrence nitrogen plant are out of work this morning, but their union leaders don't plan to go down without a fight.
Leaders of Local 5-0613 of the Paper, Allied Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union are mulling legal action regarding Farmland's decision to shut down the Lawrence plant, a move that pushed 102 union workers into unemployment as of midnight Friday.
Trig Oleson, the local's secretary/treasurer, said union leaders were considering filing complaints involving discrimination and worker-safety concerns.
The Lawrence plant is Farmland's only union plant, he said, opening the company to union-busting accusations. Oleson said he doubts that the 30 remaining union employees will be enough to cover a 500-acre plant, even if it no longer produces anhydrous ammonia or urea ammonium nitrate.
"They've got 34 supervisors overseeing these 30 people," said Oleson, who wore a "LAYOFFS CAN'T CURE POOR MANAGEMENT" T-shirt to work at the plant's garage Friday. Early this morning he'll move over to the skeleton crew as a senior operator in the ammonia plant.
"They're pouring a lot of money down the tubes, as far as I'm concerned. " We think it's unjust, we think it's unfair and we think it's unwarranted."
Farmland administrators had officials from the state's Department of Human Resources on hand Friday to help laid-off employees fill out unemployment forms.
Dick Lind, the plant's manager, blamed the shutdown and layoffs on a "supply imbalance" brought on by a glut of fertilizer in a soft agribusiness market. Even after cutting production earlier this year, Farmland's six fertilizer plants still produced too much fertilizer to sell, he said.
Lind said the decision to close had nothing to do with the plant having union employees. He still hopes to reopen the plant once the market turns around.
The next two weeks previously had been scheduled for a biannual "turnaround," when crews would have stopped production for 16 days to perform up to $4 million worth of inspections and maintenance so that the plant would continue safe and efficient operations.
That certainly won't happen now and may never happen again.
"There's no need to put money in the plant if it's not going to run again," Lind said.
-- Mark Fagan's phone message number is 832-7188. His e-mail address is mfagan@ljworld.com.
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