Louisiana’s 6,000 or so Dow Chemical employees—nearly half of whom work at the company’s 1,500-acre facility in Plaquemine—don’t know yet how worldwide layoffs announced earlier today will affect them.
A spokeswoman with the company’s corporate communications division says the layoffs will be implemented over the next two years, and that employees will be given more information on the situation “when it impacts them, if at all.”
“Right now, the only information we have is that this is a 3% impact to our global workforce,” Rachelle Schikorra, a Dow spokesperson, says. “How that plays out and what that looks like over our different geographic regions, I don’t have any information on that right now.”
Dow announced this morning it will cut 3% of its global workforce as it prepares to break off a significant part of its chlorine operations in a deal announced earlier this year with Olin Corp. Dow says the cuts will reduce its workforce by an estimated 1,500 to 1,750 positions. Dow employed about 53,000 people worldwide at the end of last year.
—Stephanie Riegel
