'We're here to help': Electrolux employees, state and local officials meet to plan next steps after closure
Stephanie Dickrell
There was a mixture of disappointment and optimism in a meeting between state and local officials, community and union leaders and Electrolux employees on Saturday afternoon at St. Cloud City Hall.
Electrolux announced Jan. 30 it will end production at the St. Cloud facility by 2020, eliminating 900 jobs at the plant, which manufacturers freezers.
U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer were part of meetings that included around a few dozen people.
Also included were representatives from the Greater St. Cloud Development Corporation, St. Cloud City Council, St. Cloud Technical and Community College, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration and others were on hand.
"Everybody is wanting to pull together to make sure this transition can be as smooth as possible," Smith said.
"There's nothing I can say that's going to help someone feel better ... especially someone who's been working at Electrolux for most of their career," Emmer said. "There's nothing that an elected official or even their neighbor can say, except, we're here to try and help. That's the best we can do right now."
Kleis said one of the major accomplishment of the meeting was getting all the parties together.
"If we had a tornado or a natural disaster, we would go through the same coordination. And this is (similar) .. for the 900 employees plus who have just been hit with something that nobody wants to see."
The employees got to see Saturday that the community is ready and willing to help, he said.
"The employees know there's a strong community response and a strong community that cares about their future," Kleis said.
That, and a local economy desperately in need of workers, officials said.
"Right now, it's an employee's marketplace when it comes to looking for work," Emmer said.
Attention has seemed to shift from trying to change the company's decision to how to deal with the consequences.
"Mayor Kleis made a very good point," Smith said. "The idea that we're going to be able to convince this big, multinational corporation to change the direction is probably unlikely. ... We need to really focus on that what happens next in St. Cloud."
A lot of the focus was on how to work through the next two years and what kind of compensation can be negotiated between the workers, union and the company.
"Electrolux wants them to keep making the freezers while they expand their company down in South Carolina," Klobuchar said. "So the lead time is helpful. .. Electrolux will have an incentive to keep them on."
The story of the workers has a few common themes.
There's the person who's spent their career at the factory, are a few years from retirement and are worried about the pension they've been paying into for decades.
There is the long-term employee who isn't close to retirement, but hasn't done other types of jobs, who will need to be retrained to get another job.
There's also a segment of Somali workers, about one-quarter of the Electrolux workforce, Klobuchar said. One of the workers who spoke in the meetings is part of that community. Many of them don't have a high school degree or came here for this job.
"This is their whole life, the life they've known," she said "Losing that community of the people you've worked with forever, you're not going to be able to replace that and that was really heartbreaking."
"I think all of our effort ought to be on the transition for these over 900 people who work at Electrolux, that they see the door that they can walk through for the rest of their careers," Smith said.
She recognizes the differing needs of workers.
"We need to make sure that they have lots of doors to walk through, training and retraining and making sure people have access to the information they need in the langugae they best understand," she said.
Some may seek basic computer skills needed to survive in the modern workforce, while others will look for new skills to learn.
Kleis and others added that the impact goes beyond the workers and their families. It will affect business up and downstream, such as suppliers, gas stations and restaurants.
Thinking of long-term plans, Kleis said, the city needs to start looking at what to do with the facility and land.
He hopes the city can soon start to speak with people in the neighborhood and make changes to the city's comprehensive plan and zoning.
"That's a process that takes time. But we're going to do it ahead of time, so when the time for the building to be transferred and redeveloped, we'll have done all the pre-work," he said.
While much of the discussion spoke of the future, officials still expressed their disappointment and displeasure with how the whole situation was handled by the company — in a sentence near the bottom of a press release.
"It was really startling to hear that a lot of the workers heard about this closure of this really important asset in St. Cloud literally before it was announced at the footnote of a press release announcing an expansion in another state," Smith said. "That's disheartening. These are people that have put — in some cases — decades of their life into this plant."
Klobuchar agreed.
"We first share their outrage at how this was handled," she said. "Where this factory that they've given their life to, which by all accounts had a successful workforce, is just a footnote at the bottom of a press release about expanding in South Carolina," she said.
"I thought that was just horribly handled by the company," she added. "But we can't just dwell on that."
Emmer said there's more federal and state lawmakers can do to prevent this from happening in the future.
"I think we are going to have to start to look at what drove that decision and why," he said. "It's time that those of us that are in these positions start to ask those questions of the business leaders that are making these very important decisions that have an impact on a community and on a state."
He said it's unknown how tax incentives and other factors influenced the company's decision.
"We do know that tax policy does drive human behavior.," he said. "Whether that is ultimately what drove this decision, we don't know that. But we're certainly going to try and figure it out."
Read more
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South Carolina county gave Electrolux massive incentive for expansion
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'Not welcome news': Officials react to Electrolux closure news with shock, sadness
Electrolux to close St. Cloud facility, production to end after 2019; 900 jobs affected