Weiser Lock Moving Out : Huntington Beach Plant Will Close, Lay Off 1,100
Weiser Lock Co., one of Orange County’s largest employers, said Friday that it will phase out its Huntington Beach manufacturing operation and lay off about 1,100 employees over the next 18 months.
The company, a subsidiary of Masco Corp. of Taylor, Mich., is a major manufacturer of residential and commercial locks and lock sets, with just under $100 million in annual sales.
Weiser President James Connors told employees of the company’s decision to shut down the Huntington Beach operation at a meeting in the plant at 3:30 p.m. Friday. Weiser is the city’s second-largest employer.
The Orange County plant will be closed, Connors said, in part because of the high costs of doing business in the Southern California coastal area.
He would not elaborate, but many Orange County manufacturers have complained that the high cost of housing here makes it difficult to find good workers unless they boost their pay scales so high that they cannot remain competitive.
Connors said that Weiser will eliminate some of its less profitable lines and will turn to outside suppliers for many of the parts it now makes itself. The company’s new plant, he said, could be located elsewhere in California or in one of the Southwestern states.
Employees took the news “reasonably well,” said Ron Spencer, Weiser’s vice president for personnel, “although this kind of news is something employees never want to hear. They have seen what we have been doing to try to avoid this, so it wasn’t a complete surprise.”
But several employees interviewed outside the plant Friday evening said that company officials have been telling them that the factory wouldn’t be closed.
An employee named Luis, who asked that his last name not be used, said Weiser “had the reputation of being a solid place. Like, they hire you and there will always be a place for you. I’m a foreman, been here six or seven years.”
He said he began hearing rumors about possible layoffs or a plant closing several months ago.
“Management said not to listen to them,” he said. “My supervisor told me last week what was going to happen to the company. What can I say? Right now, I don’t know what I’m going to do; neither does anyone else.”
‘Comes at a Horrible Time’
And a woman who identified herself only as a clerical worker at the plant’s administrative offices said she was angry because “our supervisors have been telling us all along that this wouldn’t happen. What about helping us look for other jobs? Weiser is promising to, but I don’t know. . . . This comes at a horrible time. I have a six-month-old child and my husband and I bought a house last year.”
Most of the employees who were leaving Weiser’s facility at 5555 McFadden Ave., however, were unwilling to discuss what they had just heard inside. Most had grim looks on their faces and marched purposefully to their cars.
Weiser competes in the same markets as Kwikset Corp. of Anaheim, and Schlage Lock Co. of San Francisco. It also has manufacturing facilities in British Columbia, Thailand and Mexico, but the company’s entire U.S. production comes from the Huntington Beach plant.
Connors said the domestic lock industry is under intense pressure because the market is relatively flat and subject to increasing competition from foreign lock makers. Foreign companies, he said, have tripled their share of the U.S. lock market in the past five years.
To Give Employees Time
Weiser decided to announce its decision to pull out of Huntington Beach now instead of waiting until late next year, Connors said, to give employees as much time as possible to find other jobs.
Spencer said that Weiser intends “to handle this situation with compassion and to be reasonable.”
An extensive out-placement program will be instituted soon, he said, to help employees prepare resumes, learn job interview skills and otherwise prepare themselves for the plant closing. He said other area employers would be asked to conduct job interviews at the Weiser plant.
Additionally, Spencer said, all employees will be vested 100% in their retirement funds, regardless of length of service, so they can collect a lump-sum payment or roll the fund into another retirement program once their jobs are gone. That vesting will be extended to the 50 or so Weiser employees who have been terminated since January, Spencer said.
Severance Pay Provided
The company also will provide employees with a severance pay package that will provide as much as 26 weeks of pay to the workers with the longest tenure, he said.
Joyce Ridell, executive director of the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce, said that the closure of the Weiser plant “will be a blow to the community. Those people don’t only work here, a lot of them live here and shop here.”
She said she had just been informed of the decision at the same time the company’s employees heard about it and was still “shocked.” Chamber officials will discuss the plant closure and means of offsetting it at future meetings, she said.
“The city has a dynamic community development department and the chamber works closely with it,” Ridell said. “And I imagine that we probably will launch a cooperative effort to locate a company, or several smaller companies, to take over the facility and fill the gap that Weiser’s departure will leave.”
Trying to Be Competitive
Connors said the company has been attempting for the past six months to find some way to remain competitive without closing its headquarters plant, but has been unable to come up with any alternative.
He said that Weiser--part of a $2-billion-a-year building and hardware conglomerate--is profitable, but not as profitable as it should be.
The company currently manufactures almost all of its own parts and components, “even the screws,” Connors said, and can no longer afford to do so and keep its prices competitive.
He said Weiser intends to keep its administrative offices with about 100 employees “in the area around Huntington Beach” but will seek a new location for its manufacturing plant. The Huntington Beach plant will be closed at the end of January, 1990, Connors said.
The new plant, he said, will be about half the size of the 750,000-square-foot factory being shut down. Connors said he has no idea how many people will be employed at the new plant.
Times staff writer Rod McCullom contributed to this report.
