Swisher International to Cut 150 Jobs

Swisher International is a company that many people do not know about, unless you do a lot of smoking. For those of you not familiar with the company here is a look at how they describes itself, “Swisher’s Jacksonville facility is still the world’s largest cigar factory, producing more than 14 million cigars per day. Swisher International is a leader in the tobacco business, accounting for one-third of the nation’s cigar sales, and stands as America’s largest cigar exporter. More recently, the small-sized cigar has increased in popularity and our main entry into the field, the Swisher Sweets Little Cigar, has risen to be the industry’s bestseller. Our smokeless brands, known for outstanding freshness and exceptional value, continue to steal market share from the competition.”

Well it looks like the company is hoping to continue to take its market share with a lot less in the way of workers. The company is looking to cut back on its worker by a whopping fifteen percent. The company will be cutting back on about 150 of its hourly workers in order to make ends meet. The company has not said where all of the workers are coming from, but the chances are high that a significant number of the workers to be cut will come from Jacksonville, where the company is based.

Lee Creasman, the Vice President of Human Resources for Swisher, had the following to say about the job cuts in a statement made to a reporter for Jacksonville.com, “We’ve been adversely impacted by numerous government regulations and taxes that primarily came in 2009 as a result of the Supplemental Health Insurance program… We still are a significant employer here in Jacksonville, still have a significant workforce… This is our primary manufacturing facility and we’re hopeful that this would be the last layoff that we are forced to make.”

These jobs cuts will be more than enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” Under the rules of a mass layoff action the company is required to give extra notice to the workers who are going to be impacted. This extends the amount of time from when a notice is given to when the workers are actually put out of a job. Workers in this period will have some time to find new jobs, but in the current downturned economy it is not likely that the workers are going to find new jobs before they go onto the unemployment payrolls.

Currently the company is not giving out any information about what kind of severance the workers will get, if any.