The blueprint for cutting 15,000 jobs from Motorola Inc.’s worldwide workforce includes shutting a leased battery pack plant in Vernon Hills, moving its operations to the company’s cell phone factory in Harvard and eliminating as many as 200 jobs.
Motorola spokeswoman Ann Stuessy said that only 200 to 300 of the 400 workers at the Vernon Hills facility in Lake County will be needed as a result of the consolidation.
The company will try to find places for the remaining workers, but if the effort is unsuccessful, their jobs will be eliminated, Stuessy said.
The Vernon Hills factory, which Motorola began operating four years ago, is a light assembly facility for cell phone battery packs.
Operations will shift to Harvard in neighboring McHenry County between October and December, and production will be expanded at battery pack plants in Atlanta and in Tianjin, China, to offset capacity lost in the Vernon Hills shutdown, Stuessy said.
“The primary purpose of this is to go from leased space to Motorola-owned space,” Stuessy said.
Outside the Vernon Hills plant Friday, employees said they appreciated Motorola’s efforts to find jobs for displaced workers, but were apprehensive about the company’s declining fortunes and the hardships it might mean for them.
“I don’t want to leave this company,” said a five-year veteran of the Vernon Hills facility’s electrical department, who asked not to be named. He said he would face a lengthy commute if he transferred to the Harvard factory about 40 miles northwest. “I’m worried about the (company’s) financial situation,” he said. “They said they’ll try to move us around. And they said if they don’t get any positions, they’ll try outside of Motorola.”
Motorola announced plans June 4 to eliminate 10 percent of its 150,000 employees, to achieve eventual savings of $750 million a year.
The company took a $1.98 billion charge in its second quarter to pay for the downsizing. Earnings, before the special charge, plunged to one cent per share, compared with 64 cents per share for the quarter one year earlier.
In remarks accompanying Motorola’s second-quarter earnings report July 7, President and chief operating officer Robert Growney said the company had already cut 2,200 positions and targeted 6,700 more jobs for elimination.
Motorola has not made a public, companywide accounting of where cuts have been made.
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