Baton Rouge’s Turner Industries Group is closing its steel pipe fabrication plant in Corpus Christi.
The company told the Texas Workforce Commission in April that it was laying off 40 workers at the plant. While that letter indicated the layoffs were expected to be temporary, Turner Industries last week notified the agency that the layoffs will now likely be permanent.
The San Antonio Business Journal reports the company initially planned to begin layoffs on June 11 but now expects that “certain employees” will lose their jobs on June 25 and could work until July 9 fulfilling customer orders. Once those orders are fulfilled, the company plans to close the plant.
A company representative, however, expressed optimism that the plant would reopen and that the workers would one day return to their jobs.
“We continue to believe that this is a temporary reduction,” Warren Landry, executive vice president of the company’s fabrication division, said in a statement to the Business Journal. “Shuttering the Corpus facility is largely a result of consolidating operations.” He didn’t say which operations were consolidating or give a date for when the Corpus plant might reopen and the workers could return to their jobs.
