Layoffs deal city a blow

Other shoes fell to the floor with disheartening thuds Wednesday morning as workers at the plant that has been Waynesboro’s lifeblood for almost 80 years learned that part of the facility will be idled and 210 workers laid off. Invista, the successor to DuPont, is the city’s largest employer and a barometer of Waynesboro’s economic vitality or want of it. And so a city gasps.

At its factory set on a 400-acre plot on the banks of the South River, Invista produces nylon fiber for Stainmaster carpet and Lycra fiber for use in hosiery, socks and sportswear. The nylon operation will be idled indefinitely. The company also operates a spandex research and development center at the site it took over from DuPont in 2004.

The carpet industry, upon which Invista heavily relies, peaked three years ago then began a slide that appears to be accelerating. With home construction plunging amid the collapsing market, carpet purchases have slipped by a fourth since 2005, according to Kemp Harr, publisher of Floor Focus Magazine, a trade journal based in Chattanooga, Tenn. Invista also has felt the pinch from a polyester product introduced by DuPont, now a competitor, that has nibbled away at the market for nylon.

Those trends and others – earnings have fallen by 50 percent at Koch Industries, Invista’s Kansas-based parent company – have precipitated cutbacks elsewhere. Invista earlier this year laid off 400 of 500 workers at a Delaware plant and announced plans to shutter a facility in Canada.

All of this and the economy’s floundering added to wall writings that have fed fears among locals that Invista is not long for Waynesboro. The company bills the latest — and deepest – round of cutbacks as a “restructuring” that workers privately mutter is more so a prelude to an end chapter. It will result in 575 contract and company layoffs at a plant where the work force once was 1,100.

Still, having long braced for what was considered inevitable, workers and their families are struggling to salve the wounds. Never is the best time for a layoff, but the sting is especially bitter when it comes two weeks before Christmas. We share the ache in workers’ stomachs, where it surely feels as though they’ve received swift, hard kicks from their employer.

Invista officials explain that the market dictated action to ensure the company’s viability. “While the decision to idle nylon production at the Waynesboro site is difficult,” plant Manager Mike Laczynski said in a statement, “it is necessary given the rapid decline in demand for carpet. We must manage our business in line with current market circumstances.”

Unraveling further the rationale behind Invista’s move is daunting because officials are tight-lipped about their business strategy, as is the case at most privately held companies. We share the hope expressed by Vice Mayor Frank Lucente that “if consumer confidence comes back … the plant comes back to full service.” Laczynski echoed this: “We intend to restart the idled operations in the future.”

But such optimism, feeble at best, should not silence the alarms that ought to be ringing in City Hall. The era in which Waynesboro could rely on a dominant manufacturer to power the local economy long has been fading and now could be on the verge of going to black.

To escape the lengthening shadows of brighter days, Waynesboro must get to work on diversifying its base, rebuilding its downtown core and luring in companies built for the new century. The blows dealt by Invista’s restructuring land harder because of city officials’ decades-long failure to recognize and act on this imperative.