Firm Shatters Workers With Shutdown News : Closing: After 6 decades, Ball-InCon Glass Packaging Corp.’s Santa Ana plant will fold, putting 300 people out of work.
Like a pickle jar striking a concrete floor, the news hit workers Wednesday at Ball Corp.’s glass factory with a shattering suddenness.
After six decades, the Ball-InCon Glass Packaging Corp. plant here will shut down, putting 300 people out of work. The company, which took over the operation only this year, said it will close rather than spend the millions of dollars that would be needed to comply with stringent air-quality regulations.
The workers, some of whom are second- or third-generation employees, will be laid off or transferred. They will be losing jobs that pay enough money--an average of $13.85 an hour--on which to raise a family.
“They are good-paying jobs, and that’s what is going to hurt,” said Wanda Logan, a 29-year employee who is president of the plant’s union local. “These people are not going to be able to find jobs that pay this well.”
Word of the closing, to be completed by October, came as a shock for workers. Many had planned to spend their entire careers with Ball and had bought houses in the expectation that they had job security.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Patrick Ferguson, whose wife, Julianne, is nine months’ pregnant. “I’ve got two kids, and my wife and I both work here.”
But glassmaking, which involves firing a concoction of sand and other materials at high temperatures, can be a dirty business. New air-pollution regulations require that the factory’s single furnace be upgraded with $7 million in improvements, Logan said. With 14 other plants across the country, Ball decided that the Santa Ana plant and another in Sand Springs, Okla., have become prohibitively costly to maintain.
At the same time, the glass industry has been losing ground to makers of plastic containers. The Santa Ana plant, which makes glass jars and bottles, has also been hampered by society’s cut-down in alcohol consumption, which has lessened demand for beer bottles.
“It is not feasible, from an economic and competitive standpoint, to keep these plants running,” H. Ray Looney, president of Ball-InCon, said in a statement.
For that, employees Wednesday blamed environmentalists, not the company. Compared to other Southland factories, the glass plant has a pretty good environmental record, they said.
Air-pollution inspectors looked over the facility as recently as October and did not find major violations, said Claudia Keith, spokeswoman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
The most recent violation on record was in 1988, a citation for generating excessive dust.
Ball, which earlier this year began leasing the plant from longtime owner Kerr Glass Manufacturing Corp. in Los Angeles, filed new air-pollution permit applications when it acquired the facility. The applications were either approved or are pending, Keith said.
But the cost of fixing the furnace to keep the air clean is potentially so expensive that Ball InCon decided that it would rather pull out.
“We all feel like California has to do something,” said Ball employee Robert Beatrice, who has spent 30 years in the glass industry, five of them in Santa Ana. “It’s nice to clean up the air, but not at the expense of jobs.”
The plant was built on St. Andrews Place in the 1930s to make glass for windows. After World War II, it switched to making glass bottles. It has made the bottles for such well-known products as French’s Mustard, Crystal Geyser water and Knott’s jams and preserves.
Ball In-Con announced the closing to its customers and employees like a well-rehearsed invasion. It flew top brass from the company’s headquarters in Muncie, Ind., to meet with employees, tell them of job counseling that will be available and openings at other Ball plants, including one in El Monte that also makes glass.
“We told them the truth. No tricks,” said Francis E. Paladino, Ball-InCon’s senior vice president.
Because glassmaking is a round-the-clock operation in which no worker leaves until he or she is relieved, the company rounded up employees as they headed through the exit gate and herded them into a room where they got the news. Some wept, including a woman who dabbed away tears as she stood outside the plant gate after her early morning shift ended.
“It’s sad,” packer Dorothy Dotson said. “It comes kind of abruptly, kind of knocks you off your feet.”
