Orrville’s second-largest private employer, JLG Industries Inc., will lay off 279 employees and close its local factory by the end of September.
JLG, owned by heavy-duty truck maker Oshkosh Corp. and headquartered in Maryland, makes aerial work platforms and cranelike telehandlers, also called boom lifts and cherry pickers, that are attached to wheeled heavy machinery and trucks. Telehandler manufacturing will be relocated to JLG’s Pennsylvania plants, the company said.
JLG’s engineering services will remain in Orrville, with 86 employees.
This latest news comes on top of the company’s announcement in September that it will close its Orrville parts distribution center by Aug. 1. Wisconsin-based Oshkosh said JLG will use XPO Logistics, a “third-party logistics company” to handle that segment of its business. The parts distribution center closure means the loss of 160 jobs later this year.
“They’ve been our second-largest employer the last few years,” said Dave Handwerk, mayor of the 8,300-population city in Wayne County. “They’ve been a good company. They had steadily grown and steadily built their business.”
The mayor said he was “not overly surprised” by JLG’s announcement, based in part on what he had been hearing from employees there and in part on last summer’s announcement.
Orrville officials will be working to help displaced JLG employees find jobs elsewhere, Handwerk said.
“We have a lot of industries here looking for employees,” he said. “I know we’ll work with as many agencies [as we can] to get people placed.”
The closure and job losses “will be a pretty big ding to the city financially,” Handwerk said. He anticipates the city will soon begin discussions on finding another business or businesses to move into the soon-to-be vacated JLG spaces.
JLG Industries had 600 employees in Orrville at the end of 2015, according to Wayne County financial figures. Besides being Orrville’s second-largest employer, JLG was the county’s seventh-largest employer at that time.
In its latest announcement this week, JLG said it is also closing a factory in Belgium and an engineering center in Great Britain.
“As part of our simplification strategy, we have evaluated our global manufacturing footprint and product offering to ensure our operations and product portfolio continue to remain competitive and meet current and future market demands,” Frank Nerenhausen, Oshkosh executive vice president and president, access division, said in a statement.
The combined closures in Orrville and in Europe will result in about 525 employees losing their jobs, the company said.
The changes are expected to save the company $20 million to $25 million annually, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Oshkosh Corp. said in a filing it will take pretax charges of $45 million to $50 million related to the new Orrville and Europe moves.
Orrville’s and Wayne County’s largest private employer is food giant J.M. Smucker Co., with about 1,800 employees.
Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him @JimMackinnonABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/JimMackinnonABJ