TMK IPSCO not closing, layoffs coming

February 5, 2016 at 12:00a.m.

BROOKFIELD

TMK IPSCO is not closing.

But there will be layoffs at the plant at 6880 Parkway Drive.

The 106 employees at the plant who make specialty connections on pipe used in the oil-and-gas industry all recently received the federally mandated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, WARN, to alert them that there will be layoffs.

WARN is a “federal law that says if you are going to lay off more than one-third of the employees, you have to give them a 60-day notice to do that,” said Roger Bentley, director of communications for TMK IPSCO, one of the largest North American producers of welded and seamless pipe and premium connections.

Bentley was not sure of the number of layoffs expected to happen this year, but he added that no one has been laid off yet.

The downturn in the oil-and-gas industry led to the layoffs. The price of oil has dropped by more than 50 percent since June 2014. The cost for West Texas Intermediate crude oil, an industry benchmark, was $31.69 a barrel Thursday. In comparison, on June 30, 2014, WTI oil was $105.37 a barrel, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The drop in the price led companies to make major cutbacks on drilling.

Baker Hughes, an oil field service company that keeps a count of the nation’s rigs, shows the U.S. rig count dropping by 924 year over year, down to 619.

The cutbacks made by oil-and-gas companies means an impact on companies such as TMK IPSCO and the local pipe-producing plant Vallourec Star on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Youngstown, where multiple workforce reductions have been made. Last year, about 20 employees were laid off at the local plant.