Share
Fourteen members of Unifor Local 28-O leave their jobs today as production at the DuPont plant in Maitland, Ontario, winds down.
They are leaving as part of a shutdown of the plant announced by the company more than a year ago. The final closure comes February 28, 2014, when the remaining 24 workers at the plant will be permanently laid off.
"This is a very difficult time for the members, and the community," said plant unit chair Bruce Brownell.
The union negotiated a severance package of two weeks per year for the laid off workers.
Dupont began producing performance polymers, a form of nylon pellets used in injection moulding, at its Maitland plant in the mid-1980s.
Performance polymers are used in the automotive industry and other manufacturing processes to produce many of the parts that most people think of as plastic, but are actually made from the much-stronger nylon product. This would include items such as automotive bumpers and the polymer bodies of chainsaws and portable electric tools.
At its peak, the plant employed 69 members of the local.
The products produced at Maitland will now be made at plants in the United States.
