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One side effect of a national recession is that many people lack the money to buy unnecessary consumer goods, such as extra clothing or electronics. This is turn has an affect on the company’s that provide these products. As a result, their profits take a nosedive, often causing them to layoff workers in order to cut expenses. For these reasons, one clothing manufacture recently announced that it will be doing away with jobs in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

According to a press release put out by Hanesbrands Inc. on April 27th, the company will be doing away with a total of 500 employees throughout its organization. Job cuts will occur at both the company’s corporate management offices and its U.S. distribution centers.

Around 250 of the management employees who will be losing their jobs will be informed of such before the end of this week. Approximately 200 of these cuts will come from the Winston-Salem jobs that Hanes provides. Another 30 positions will be lost elsewhere in the U.S., while 20 employees from the company’s global workforce will lose their jobs.

As far as the company’s distribution operations go, Hanes will be laying off 40 employees immediately from its Winston-Salem distribution center, which is located on Annapolis Drive. These cuts come as a result of a reduced product volume and are part of the company’s effort to close the center by the end of March 2010. In the end, another 200 North Carolina jobs will be lost. Altogether that’s a total of 440 jobs lost in Winston-Salem between now and next March.

Currently, Hanes is in the process of terminating its contract with a third-party that operates a distribution center in Jacksonville, Florida. Approximately 10 of the company’s employees will be laid off there between now and March 2010.

All of the employees that will be affected by the layoffs are expected to receive both severance packaged and outplacement benefits.

In order to do this, products distributed at the Winston-Salem and Jacksonville facilities will be handled by centers in Martinsville, Virginia and Perris, California. The company feels that operating fewer large centers of distribution will increase its efficiency.

According to Hanes report of the first quarter of this year, sales are down by 13 percent in comparison to last year. This means that expenses have to be reduced in order for the company to remain profitable.

“In the face of reduced consumer spending, we must manage conservatively and tightly control costs, including making the difficult decision to lay off employees during this bleak economy,” said Hanes executive vice president of human resources Kevin W. Oliver in a recent press release. “We regret losing talented employees and will miss their commitment and professionalism. We will try to do everything that we can to assist in their transition.”

Prior to the layoffs, Hanesbrands employed around 3,000 people in Forsyth County and had a worldwide workforce of about 43,000. The company believes that the expenses related to restructuring their organization will end up being somewhere around $15 million, most of which will happen in the second quart of 2009.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under job search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.