Wednesday, January 12, 2011

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Evergreen Solar layoffs surprise Devens, Marlborough employees

By Kyle Alspach

“Nobody was expecting it.”

That’s what I heard today from a 45-year-old employee of Evergreen Solar, one of the 800 who will lose their jobs by the end of March as Evergreen shutters its factory at Devens.

Sure, Evergreen (Nasdaq:ESLRD) had announced it would outsource its solar panel assembly to China by the end of this year. But this employee — who declined to have her name published, saying she didn’t want to put her remaining time at the job at risk — doesn’t do solar panel assembly. For nearly three years she’s worked in Devens as a fabrication operator for solar wafers, the building block for panels.

“That was the part that was supposed to be staying,” she said. “We thought we were all set...Now we’re sinking.”

High on the list of her reasons for worrying: her job provides the health insurance for her husband and two sons, ages 18 and 20, who live at the family’s Central Massachusetts home. She also just bought a new car, and her husband, a machinist, recently took a 10 percent pay cut due to weak economic conditions.

Not to mention the poor prospects for getting another job.

“There’s nothing out there that pays what I’m making,” she said.

She admits that she did suspect that Evergreen might pull out of Devens eventually, with the company struggling to compete with solar manufacturing in lower-cost regions such as China.
But not this soon.

“We figured we had at least couple more years in there,” she said.

It’s not just the Evergreen employees at Devens that were likely taken by surprise on Tuesday. The company’s headquarters, in Marlborough, will also experience layoffs, said Evergreen spokesman Chris Lawson. “Some of the cuts will come from Marlborough but beyond that I don’t have any finite numbers yet. That will all be determined in the coming weeks,” Lawson said in an e-mail.

Evergreen says the move is necessary to preserve cash and put the company on more solid ground in the highly-competitive solar industry. The plan is for the company to evolve into a producer of standard-sized solar wafers, which can be sold to solar panel manufacturers. The company so far has been forced to make its own panels because its wafers aren’t the industry standard size and aren’t in demand.

As a reporter following Evergreen Solar, however, what’s struck me most about this plan is the severity of the job cuts.

In 2007, when the company struck a deal with the state to receive $58 million in connection with the new Devens plant, the grant agreements show that Evergreen employed 310 people in Massachusetts.

But subtracting 800 jobs from the company’s 2010 headcount — 925 — would leave Evergreen with just 125 jobs in Massachusetts after the plant closure, not even half of the 2007 staffing levels.

That means that this move isn’t just about Evergreen leaving Devens. Arguably, it’s about Evergreen pulling up stakes in Massachusetts altogether, as the company’s presence in the state reverts to what it was well before all of this began — when Evergreen was just a promising startup.