Shutdown Will End 450 Jobs at Kwikset Factory

After more than half a century in Anaheim, Kwikset Corp. is shutting its lock manufacturing plant there and dismissing 450 employees to move to a newer facility in South Carolina, where the cost of doing business is generally lower.

Kwikset said the move is part of a reorganization within parent company Black & Decker Corp.’s hardware and home improvement group, which also includes faucet maker Price Pfister in Pacoima.

Black & Decker is consolidating certain operations of the two divisions in Fort Mill, S.C., where the company has a state-of-the-art plant and its main distribution center. The shutdown is expected to take the rest of the year.

“It’s very difficult to close any plant but especially one that has this much history,” said Rob Webb, vice president of human resources for the company.

The Anaheim plant has been in operation for 54 years and at its peak employed more than 1,500.

Local business officials said the parent company’s decision to consolidate left them with little room to persuade Kwikset to remain in Anaheim.

The announcement of the closure comes at a time when Orange County is seeing a resurgence of overall manufacturing activity and enjoying record low unemployment. But officials said Kwikset’s departure will sting nonetheless.

Kwikset’s departure is “troublesome, but it’s not backbreaking,” said Stan Oftelie, the Orange County Business Council’s president.

“This is part of the heavy manufacturing that seems to be leaving Orange County,” he added. “A lot of it has to do with [lower] wages paid in other parts of the country and the [lower] cost of living.”

Webb said Kwikset will probably sell its Anaheim plant, which is in a residential neighborhood about a mile from City Hall.

“It wasn’t a typical factory neighborhood,” said Mike Neben, executive vice president of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce. “They kept the surroundings in the neighborhood very, very nice. They were an important employer, and we’ll miss them.”

Kwikset, which also has maintained administrative and sales headquarters and its West Coast assembly in Anaheim, had complained years ago that it had no room to expand in Anaheim--one reason it built plants in Texas and Oklahoma.

But it vowed in 1992, several years after competitor Weiser Lock Co. left Huntington Beach for economic reasons, that it would not leave Anaheim. Yet Kwikset, once the third-largest employer in the city, decided about 2 1/2 years ago to eliminate about 400 plant jobs.

Kwikset executives said the newer plant in South Carolina and its proximity to the Black & Decker distribution center will help increase productivity and speed delivery of its door locks and other products.

Employees were told late last week that they would be losing their jobs beginning in May. Webb said affected employees will be given a minimum of 60 days’ notice and offered a severance package based on the length of service. Some employees, he said, have worked at the plant for several decades.

Dismissed employees will have the opportunity to apply for jobs in South Carolina or in other Black & Decker locations in the country.

But it is likely that most will choose to remain in Southern California and seek other work, said Ruben Aceves, head of Anaheim’s job training program. Aceves said the city is in the process of setting up meetings with the workers, the first step in trying to find work for them locally.

Besides the 450 mostly plant workers, the Anaheim complex has 150 managerial and administrative workers, who will be moved to a new office in Lake Forest.

Black & Decker also is moving 65 other Kwikset employees working in Irvine to the new office, along with Price Pfister administrative and corporate employees from Pacoima.