Ex-Cessna employees could get federal aid
It depends on if it’s ruled their jobs were shipped overseas
Published: May 12. 2009 4:00AM PST
WASHINGTON — Is it better to see your job shipped overseas, or cut because of low demand for your company’s product? Neither, you say? Actually, the answer makes a big difference when it comes to federal aid for the workers who lose their jobs.
Employees laid off by Cessna Aircraft Co. could qualify for beefed up federal benefits created by the stimulus bill earlier this year — but only if federal bureaucrats decide that their jobs were shipped overseas, rather than cut because of flagging demand for airplanes.
Last month, Cessna announced it would close its Bend manufacturing plant and let go of the roughly 200 employees left after earlier rounds of layoffs. At the time, Cessna spokesman Doug Oliver said the company closed its 140,000-square-foot plant to cut costs in the face of falling demand.
But Cessna was also in the process of shifting jobs from Bend to a factory in Chihuahua, Mexico, where it makes composite airplane parts, Oliver said Monday.
“It was in the process of happening when the decision was made to close plant,” Oliver said. “That was always the plan — to move work where we had facilities to better do the work.”
The Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council plans to apply for trade adjustment assistance on behalf of the Cessna employees, after expanded benefits from the federal stimulus bill go into effect next week.
Then it will be up to the federal Department of Labor to judge which is the real reason Cessna’s employees are losing their jobs, said Beverly Malone, Trade Act coordinator for the Oregon Employment Department
“They do quite an investigation in where they also survey the customers of the company to determine the root cause,” Malone said.
On Friday, the Labor Department released $101 million in trade adjustment assistance, including $5.6 million for Oregon. Those benefits, for workers who made less than $55,000 a year, go far beyond what’s normally available to the unemployed. They include:
•Up to $1,500 in job search costs.
•A tax credit for 80 percent of their monthly health care premiums.
•Up to 130 weeks of cash payments for workers enrolled in full-time retraining classes.
“The Trade Act benefits are so significant, you don’t want to see anyone unnecessarily deprived of those benefits,” said Ann Delach, adult programs manager for the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council.
The money is supposed to help “trade-affected workers who have lost their jobs as a result of increased imports or shifts in production out of the United States,” according to a Labor Department fact sheet, and get those workers back into a job as quickly as possible.
COIC had applied for Trade Act benefits for Cessna employees in December, after an earlier round of layoffs, but the Labor Department hadn’t made a decision. So the council decided to reapply next week under even more significant benefits created by the stimulus bill that became law in February, Delach said. It could take a few months after that for the department to judge whether Cessna employees qualify for the aid.
But Delach said her contact at the Labor Department indicated Cessna’s former workers might not qualify for trade assistance.
“He said he was having some trouble getting together enough justification to approve them, but he wasn’t ruling it out yet,” Delach said.
Former employees at Madras-based Bright Wood did qualify for that assistance under the earlier version of the Trade Act. Cratering demand for the company’s wood components, including door frames, forced Bright Wood to slash its work force from about 900 last March in its Madras and Redmond facilities, to about 500 employees today, said company President Dallas Stovall.
In recent years, Bright Wood has imported wood from China, Chile and New Zealand to meet demand and cut costs, Stovall said. That meant fewer jobs in Central Oregon, because the foreign wood was already processed. It also had up to 80 employees at a plant in New Zealand, although now there are only about 20 workers there, Stovall said.
“We were buying quite a bit out of China the last three or four years, something like that,” Stovall said. “That displaced a lot of the domestic production here in Madras.”
Keith Chu can be reached at 202-662-7456 or at kchu@bendbulletin.com.
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