APS to Cut Jobs

American Power Source is a name that many of you may not know about in general. The company makes uniforms and clothing for a variety of organizations, most notably for the U.S. Airforce, and they will be cutting back on jobs in the near future.

The company is getting ready to cut back on 50 jobs in order to save on its profitability. This job cut is likely to be a mass layoff action. 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, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. 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.” We do know for now that the company is cutting back all of the worker from the state of Alabama.

As you can imagine this is not the only clothing maker who is getting ready to cut back on workers in order to make ends meet. Some of you may recall some of earlier cuts made to clothing company Billabong in the recent past, but for those of you who missed out here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all, “The company is getting ready to close 82 of its stores, in order to reduce its overall costs with less than encouraging sales. While, for the time being, the company has not said how many workers these closures are set to impact, but it is likely that the company will trigger at least one mass layoff action.”

Other clothing retailers, in a less specialized market, are also feeling the pinch. Here is a look at job cuts from another retailer who sells clothing, “The odds are good that you have at least seen a K-mart before, but in case you live in an area of the country that is not serviced by one of these large-scale discount retailers and you do not keep an eye on retail mergers the company is owned by the Sears holding company… In this case however it is not just the layoffs to come, it is more of an overall restucrting of how the company works. The already discounted retailer is getting ready to change some of its stores into liquidation centers, where customers can get an even deeper discount. All in all the company is going to be letting go of about 170 workers from two different locations.”

So for the time being the company  and its workers may have to wait and see how the clothing industry changes over time and what it looks like when the economy begins to recover.