Semitool cutting back again
A pedestrian walks across the south side of Semitool's campus north of Kalispell Thursday afternoon. Semitool, the third-largest private employer in Flathead County, is eliminating 200 jobs. Garrett Cheen/Daily Inter Lake
Tech firm eliminates 200 jobs
It was a good news/bad news scenario at Semitool Inc. this week.
Just three days after workers returned to their jobs after a three-week furlough over the Christmas and New Year's holidays, about 200 of them on Thursday started getting layoff notices.
Semitool Human Resources Manager Vicki Billmayer said her department and the local job service began talking with laid-off workers Thursday and would finish today.
"We notified our employees prior to the Christmas holidays that we anticipated implementing a layoff in the first week of January," the company announced Thursday in a prepared statement.
"This layoff is simply a follow-up to that announcement," the statement continued, "and is in response to extreme business circumstances in our industry and the world economy, including a number of unexpected cancellations and push-outs of customer orders from Asia [and] Europe, as well as the United States,"
Billmayer said the layoffs are considered "permanent, to the best of our knowledge."
The Northwest Montana layoffs affect workers in both Kalispell and Libby, but Billmayer said plants in both cities will continue operations for the foreseeable future.
Kalispell is the global headquarters for Semitool, a leading manufacturer of wafer processing equipment for the semiconductor industry. Semitool had been the third-largest private employer in Flathead County.
The 200 jobs that were cut include a scattering of service and sales people in Texas, California, Minnesota and on the East Coast.
An additional 80 Semitool employees are being laid off in Asia and Europe.
"We continue to take other actions to make sure our expenses are properly aligned with business levels, including salary reductions, time off and other measures," the company announced.
"We do not have a current plan for a follow-up layoff; however, like other companies impacted by world economic conditions, we will have to remain responsive to those conditions."
This week's job cuts come just two months after Semitool laid off about 100 workers at its Kalispell and Libby plants, paring its local work force to 700 people.
Then on Dec. 9 the company announced it was cutting back to a skeleton production crew of about 20 people through Jan. 5. It earlier had required each worker to take 80 hours off work during the fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, with the time going unpaid if the worker had no vacation or other paid leave left.
Lagging customer orders from plants that traditionally shut down over the holidays were blamed along with the sluggish global economy.
Laid-off workers qualify for retraining and other opportunities under the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance program. Semitool qualified last year for the federal help because the firm demonstrated that work cutbacks are due, at least in part, to global competition in the industry.
Reporter Nancy Kimball may be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com