Faced with a slowing U.S. manufacturing economy, Milacron Inc. has laid off 115 employees at machinery plants in Ohio and Michigan.
"We are clearly in a climate of reduced demand," said Al Beaupre, director of corporate communications at Milacron, the largest U.S. maker of plastics machinery.
Milacron laid off 70 people at its main plastics equipment factory in Batavia, Ohio, and a machining plant in nearby Mount Orab, Ohio. The cuts represent about 5 percent of the total employment of 1,400 at both facilities, Beaupre said. He did not break down the number of layoffs at each plant.
The company also cut 45 jobs at Uniloy Milacron Inc. — about 10 percent of the total jobs at the blow molding machinery plant in Manchester, Mich.
Most of the job cuts are factory-floor workers. That's a change from last year, when Milacron eliminated 400 mostly white-collar positions under a corporate-wide efficiency program, Beaupre said.
Beaupre said most of the people laid off in Batavia were hired fairly recently. Milacron had built up employment there to meet growing U.S. demand for injection molding machines.
Uniloy Milacron "is still faced with the aftermath of the consolidation in the dairy industry" that has slowed machinery sales, Beaupre said. Uniloy Milacron picked up some dairy orders earlier this year, but it was not a sustained rebound, he said.
Milacron's layoffs follow job cuts at HPM Corp. In recent months, HPM laid off 76 hourly and salaried employees from its plastics machinery and die-casting equipment operations in Mount Gilead, Ohio.
